From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

The UK Met Office has lurched into conspiracy theory territory in a desperate attempt to rescue scientific credibility in its Net Zero-weaponised ‘junk’ temperature measuring network. In a recent public pronouncement, it claimed: “The efforts of a small number of people to undermine the integrity of Met Office observations by obscuring or misrepresenting facts is an attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world’s changing climate.” The astonishing outburst relates of course to the recent revelations of the Daily Sceptic and a number of citizen sleuths. In March 2024, the Daily Sceptic disclosed that nearly 80% of all UK measuring sites are so poorly located they have massive temperature ‘uncertainties’. Meanwhile, Ray Sanders and Dr Eric Huxter have provided convincing proof of the lamentable state of the unnatural heat-ravaged network and its tendency to produce elevated temperatures and short-term heat spikes.

Narrative-obsessed mainstream media has been on its best behaviour and kept quiet about the growing scandal, but the shocking state of the Met Office recording operation, and its continued use to raise climate alarm, is widely discussed on social online media.

“Despite online speculation,” said the Met Office, “much of which demonstrates a clear misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the facts, Met Office weather stations are subject to stringent national and international guidelines.” The Met Office team is said to carry out hundreds of site inspections a year. “A rigorous quality assurance system, including a long-standing and well-honed site inspection methodology, ensures that data produced at our sites are as accurate as they can be,” it observed. Ray Sanders recently discovered that 103 sites providing long-term data did not actually exist and measurements were being invented/estimated from “well-correlated related neighbouring sites”. Alas, subsequent efforts to discover the identity of these vital well-correlated inputs drew a blank with Freedom of Information requests denied as “vexatious” and not in the public interest.

The ‘uncertainties’ mandated by the World Meteorological Organisation mean 48.7% of the network, based in junk Class 4, is subject to errors up to 2°C, while an almost unbelievable 29.2% in super-junk Class 5 could be out by up to 5°C. One-minute heat spikes, such as that behind the 40.3°C all-time UK record at RAF Coningsby at a time of nearby Typhoon jet activity, are common. Despite international guidance, the Met Office insists on using 60-second data recorded by recently installed sensitive electronic devices to declare individual records and higher average daily totals. Dr Huxter’s recent work indicated that daily ‘extremes’ declared throughout last May were on average 0.8°C higher than the two recordings made at the before and after hour mark. At Kew Gardens, the Met Office claimed a national May Day record high of 29.3°C at 2.59pm, but this was a massive 2.6°C higher than the 2pm recording and 0.76°C above the 3pm reading.

Like many self-important and unaccountable bureaucracies, the Met Office has a marked tendency towards supercilious arrogance. “We understand that the data from thousands of independent global weather stations (over the last seven decades) which shows a warming trend may be an uncomfortable reality for some.” Nobody, of course, denies the world is in a warming phase and that humans may have contributed by using hydrocarbons. This arrogance is a silly red herring. The Met Office has a basic temperature network that has grown from a largely amateur base in response to the needs of specific groups such as the military. It was never designed to provide an ambient, uncorrupted air temperature of the UK, let alone be utilised to help provide a global figure. It was good enough for the rough-and-ready purposes for which it was designed, but it is unable to show, as the Met Office claimed, that 2023 across the UK was 0.06°C cooler than the record year of 2022. The Met Office is simply pulling the public’s chain if it thinks it can claim recordings accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade using its current crappy nationwide network.

The science journalist Matt Ridley recently laid his finger on what has gone wrong at the Met Office. It has been ”embarrassingly duped by activists”. It believes that most of the recent warming has been caused by humans, even though the evidence for this statement arises mainly from simplistic climate models. Net Zero has died in the United States and sceptical voices are increasingly being heard. Decades of politicised settled science are being replaced with a broader wish to understand how the atmosphere works. The role of natural variation is being discussed and the ‘greening’ benefits of higher temperatures and carbon dioxide are being considered. The idea of a ‘settled’ anthropogenic climate opinion is starting to look rather dated. The scare/scam was useful for promoting the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy, but that fantasy is rapidly falling apart as hydrocarbon reality sets in.

Stuffed with activists, the Met Office continues on its deranged course of political Net Zero fear-mongering, turning weather maps purple in summer and issuing constant weather warnings to the amusement of grown adults. The only “uncomfortable reality” is that suffered by the Met Office with its inability to counter the charge that it is using junk statistics to claim that warming is higher than it actually is.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

H/T strativarius

From THE MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

Here in New York City, in the grip of the hysterical climate cult, we are undertaking a massive transformation of our energy system without anyone in authority having done the simple arithmetic to check whether the plans have any chance of succeeding. A big theme of this blog has been pointing out the obvious problems that mean that these “net zero” schemes can never work. But maybe it’s not really important whether they will ever work or not. Maybe the real point is just to spend a lot of (somebody else’s) money to show that you, somehow, “care.”

A very similar scenario is now playing out in the closely related category they are calling climate “resiliency.” The word means getting ready for the impending climate armaggedon. The armaggedon isn’t coming, of course, but we will anyway spend vast sums supposedly to show we are “doing something” about the problem. Whether the scheme in question might actually work is beside the point.

And thus a couple of days ago there debuted at the southern tip of Manhattan a completely remade Wagner Park. Wagner Park, originally opened in 1996 as part of the Battery Park City development, was previously just a pleasant waterfront lawn of about 3.5 acres. Then the eco-zealots came into the picture, and advocated that the park was at grave risk of inundation from the sea level rise attendant to anthropogenic global warming. The park needed to be raised up to save both itself and the larger inland areas of our fragile island.

About two years ago they began a massive earth-moving project to raise this park up about ten feet to stave off the sea. Now that the newly-renovated space has just re-opened, Steve Cuozzo at the New York Post has a piece reporting on the results, headline: “Wagner Park’s disastrous $300M eco-zealot makeover is an insult to downtown New York City.” Here is a picture from the Post of what the new space looks like:

You can see that the previous lawn has been mostly replaced by a series of terraces rising steeply from the waterfront. Cuozzo has nothing but harsh criticism for the aesthetics of the project:

The “new” Wagner Park in Battery Park City opened this week after a two-year closure and a nearly $300 million redesign. . . . Mature London plane trees were uprooted. The park’s central area was elevated 10 feet in order to conceal a buried flood wall. Much of the lawn was sliced and diced into a ziggurat of paver-surfaced ramps and stairs that have no clear entry points. The park’s once-level, river-facing side swelled into a stepped cliff of wooden, bleacher-like seats where I saw precious few users on two sunny afternoons this week.

And exactly why did they build this huge project to revamp a perfectly nice little park? Cuozzo:

Besides enriching a legion of architects, engineers and landscape designers, the mutant “park” is supposed to protect against a theoretical, worse-than-worst case, one-day-or-someday “100-year” flood caused by rising sea levels. In fact, no such catastrophe has ever occurred. The  original park was so securely engineered that Wagner Park suffered no damage whatsoever when superstorm Sandy caused the city’s highest sea level rise ever recorded.

Cuozzo correctly belittles the idea that sea level rise caused by global warming is going to inundate Manhattan any time soon. But even if it were, this project would still be ridiculous. That’s because if the sea were to rise up, it would rise up everywhere, not just along this tiny stretch of downtown Manhattan.

The part of Manhattan south of Central Park, from 59th Street on the West Side to 59th Street on the East Side, is quite flat, with little elevation gain in the areas near the waterfront. (Above 59th Street the terrain is much hillier.). This southern part of Manhattan has about 10 miles of shoreline along the Hudson and East Rivers, all of it equally subject to flooding if the sea level were to rise. This Wagner Park project deals with only about 400 feet of this shoreline, or less than one percent. Here is a map of southern Manhattan showing the location and scope of this project:

The red arrow has been inserted to be sure that you can find the tiny red mark that indicates the portion of the shoreline represented by Wagner Park. So if the sea level were to rise up, how is that 400 feet of raised land going to prevent the water from coming inland along the rest of the 10 or so miles of waterfront?

So they have spent $300 million for a project that will inevitably fail at its stated mission, while ruining what was previously a perfectly nice park. This is not really much different from spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an energy transition that can’t possibly work. Or, for that matter, from spending a trillion or so dollars per year on the project to cure poverty, without ever putting a dent into the poverty rate.

It turns out, pushing unrealistic green energy schemes onto low- and middle-income people at the expense of a safer fuel source was not only bad science, it was dangerous propaganda.

From Legal Insurrection

Posted by Leslie Eastman 

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that in 2023, the Biden administration seriously considered a nationwide ban on gas stoves, blaming “pollutants” released by the appliances.

One of the studies cited was published in Scientific American. We documented the narrative science and agenda-driven conclusions that the publication offers.

The “study” involved 53 households, all in California.  As I reported at that time, the findings that asserted gas stoves contributed to increased risk of asthma were based on bad science.

Now, a review of the data from 116 separate studies that was recently published in The Lancet and funded by the World Health Organization shows that heating and cooking with natural gas stoves is not associated with asthma in children or adults.

The study conducted an extensive meta-analysis and examined the health risks of cooking or heating with natural gas compared to other fuels and electricity. It found no significant association between natural gas and asthma, wheeze, cough or breathlessness, and a lower risk of bronchitis when compared to electricity. When compared to other household fuels including kerosene and solid fuels, natural gas was associated with a lower risk of several health conditions.

The study’s conclusion that there is no association between the use of natural gas and asthma contradicts prior claims of population incidence of asthma attributable to gas, which are only valid where a causal relationship exists.

In fact, the Lancet study (Estimated health effects from domestic use of gaseous fuels for cooking and heating in high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries: a systematic review and meta-analyses) shows that the use of gas stoves has a very positive effect on human health, as follows:

• Pneumonia: 46% risk reduction.
• Wheeze: 58% risk reduction.
• Cough: 56% risk reduction.
• Breathlessness, COPD, Other Adverse Respiratory Impacts: Substantial risk reductions.
• Preterm Birth and Low Birth Weight: Significant reduction in risk.

It’s important to note that when natural gas burns, it mainly produces carbon dioxide (CO₂, a life-essential gas) and water vapor, with smaller amounts of nitrogen oxides (NOₓ), carbon monoxide (CO), and very little particulate matter. In contrast, coal and kerosene are more complex fuels. For example, burning coal releases high amounts of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide (SO₂), nitrogen oxides, mercury, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, all of which are linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

Therefore, pushing unrealistic green energy schemes onto low- and middle-income (LMIC) people at the expense of a safer fuel source was not only bad science, it was dangerous propaganda.

This study shows a lower risk for key health outcomes when switching from polluting solid fuels and kerosene to use of clean gaseous fuels for cooking or heating. Our study also identifies a modest increase in risk from use of gaseous fuels compared with electricity for a few health outcomes, including acute lower respiratory infections and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (although not statistically significant when focusing on evidence from higher-quality studies).

For LMICs reliant on polluting solid fuels and kerosene, transitions to gaseous fuels for cooking or heating can potentially produce substantial health benefits.

The risk of asthma associated with gas cooking was often inflated in prior studies that failed to adjust adequately for other factors (e.g., smoking, area air pollution). The Lancet meta-analysis showed that with proper adjustment for possible contributing factors, any association between gas use and child asthma was not statistically meaningful.

What are the chances the elite media will give the new Lancet publication the same about of attention it gave the bogus study?