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via JoNova
August 6, 2025 at 11:17AM
Category: Daily News
To understand the purpose of this further addendum to my previous posts on Pitsford it is important to read them first for context both here and here. In precis, a school educational weather station gained local and regional popularity despite being a non-official site variously at different locations at both ground level and on a building roof as in the headline image. Subsequently in 2018 the Met Office opted to instal a new separately located official one that was manually reporting.
For one day in 2022 this Pitsford site recorded the UK record all time highest temperature before being beaten the following day by the RAF Coningsby weather station. I personally had my doubts regarding the accuracy of this site and what credibility should be given to its readings. Ongoing events have since confirmed my view.
Following my original reports , Mike Lewis formerly of Pitsford School helpfully added a detailed comment regarding the various weather stations at the site and his role with them which I detail below.
“I read with interest the various articles concerning the met site at Pitsford. I think I’m in a better position than most to set the record straight and scotch some of the rumours concerning the authenticity of the site. Up until my retirement last April I ran the weather station for 25 years since its inception.
The weather station was established as a project to engage the sixth form in community service. The original enclosure was at ground level and laid to lawn but had to be moved to the security of the roof of the main school building owing to repeated act of vandalism. For much of its history, the site was independent of and made no claims about being linked to the Met Office. The original equipment was all secondhand and donated to the school. Very quickly, the station attracted much interest from local farmers and the wider community who funded the setting up of an automatic weather station to release real time weather data online. It was made very clear on the website what equipment was being used, where it was sited and the level of accuracy. Up until this point the only accreditation was with the climatological observers link (COL) a group of mainly amateur meteorologists.
A few years ago, the school was in fact approached by the Met office as it’s official Northampton monitoring station was facing closure as a result of the move of the university of Northampton to a new campus. The Met office were aware of the schools long-term interest in weather recording and selected the edge of the main sports field has the site of the new official monitoring site for Northampton. It was our commitment to long term recording that attracted them, not any record temperature. This has always been a manual site and the data was never contaminated with unofficial data from the schools monitoring site. Both were kept very separate. Data from the Met Office site has only ever been available from the Met Office website.
I can fully appreciate that the site’s long history of weather recording from different sites – ground then rooftop then automatic weather station and finally official Met Office site can cause some confusion to an outsider when trying to authenticate long-term weather records. However, we have always endeavoured to make it very clear on our website how the data has been recorded.
As mentioned earlier, I am now retired from the school and I’m in no position to maintain much of the weather station including its website which has now been shut down . However, the official Met Office site at Pitsford continues with a small team of observers and the data continues to be made available by the Met Office website.”
Mike was clearly dedicated to the cause and for his 25 year tenure ensured reliable readings for the private site but as he notes the official Met Office site was indeed a separately operated function. He also points out his retirement and disengagement from the school in April 2024. The observations record for 2024 has now been released to the CEDA archives and these are extremely instructive of operational standards for the year.
The temperature readings for the first 115 days up to 24th April 2024 (presumably Mike’s tenure period) were impeccable with not a single missing reading. What happened for the remaining 251 days after his retirement is much more instructive. So many readings were missing that it was only possible to derive a daily mean temperature for 114 of those days – the 137 total missing days readings (well over half) were all subsequent to Mike’s departure. No readings whatsoever appear to this day on the Met office Weatherr Obsevations Website.
I will reiterate points I have made many times before. The Met Office depicts itself as a world leading scientific institution but the reality is far from their self portrayal. Taking observations from such a high profile record setting site should NOT be down to one “amateur” individuals motivations. This is an incredibly serious area of science on whose data massively important decisions are being taken affecting every individual and business in the UK. Observers with such a low level of diligence to the purpose of the exercise (i.e. actually taking readings on a regular and reliable basis) are potentially unlikely to be adequately accurate.
It may seem improper (even slanderous) of me to even suggest the possibility of readings taken at the unofficial rooftop automatic station to have “drifted” into the manual site’s official record log. However, who could prove such an assertion was definitely wrong? The visible 2024 records from April onwards indicate a reporting level that is exceptionally poor – this is not online disinformation it is evidentially factual as this extract below demonstrates.
Columns I and J are maximum and minimum readings respectively with NA indicating no readings taken. Note the dates column readings from 254 to 256.
It is hard to envisage their former July high record reading ever being beaten if no readings at all are being taken throughout July and August.
This post is not intended to be unpleasant to anyone, but neither is it appropriate to accept such appallingly bad standards that are ultimately the responsibility of the Met Office themselves. This is further unequivocal proof they are increasingly unfit for purpose. Rather than try to make snide remarks about online bloggers querying their poor standards perhaps they should stick to their day job and do that one properly. There will inevitably, and ultimately, be consequences for such poor performance.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
August 6, 2025 at 08:57AM
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
The usual disinformation from the BBC!
Parts of the Great Barrier Reef have suffered the largest annual decline in coral cover since records began nearly 40 years ago, according to a new report.
Northern and southern branches of the sprawling Australian reef both suffered their most widespread coral bleaching, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), external found.
Reefs have been battered in recent months by tropical cyclones and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish that feast on coral, but heat stress driven by climate change is the predominant reason, AIMS said.
AIMS warns the habitat may reach a tipping point where coral cannot recover fast enough between catastrophic events and faces a "volatile" future.
AIMS surveyed the health of 124 coral reefs between August 2024 and May 2025. It has been performing surveys since 1986.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg3pp52m65o
The rest of the article is the usual BBC climate doom agenda.
Only con merchants would claim any significance when surveys only began in 1986. And, strangely, the BBC forgot to mention the fact that coral cover was at a record high the year before.
As usual, Dr Peter Ridd provides the full story in the Australian. It’s behind a paywall, but here is his account on Facebook:
My article from The Australian this morning below. But first, AIMS are agreeing that the reef is coming off record highs so the small drop should be viewed in that context. However, much of the media is still reporting the drop as a disaster.
The latest 2025 statistics on the amount of coral on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) show the reef is still doing fine despite having six allegedly cataclysmic coral bleaching events in the last decade. There should be no coral at all if those reports were true.
The normalised coral cover dropped from a record high number of 0.36 down to 0.29, but there is still twice as much coral as in 2012. The raw coral cover number for all the last five years has been higher than any of the previous years since records began in 1985. However, when one considers the uncertainty margin, the present figures are not significantly different from many of the previous years.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science collects coral data on around 100 of the 3000 individual coral reefs of the GBR. Analysis of the data at smaller scales shows the GBR is doing what it always does – change. There is a constant dynamic as cyclones, starfish plagues and bleaching events dramatically kill lots of coral in small areas, while it quietly regrows elsewhere.
Guess whether the ‘science’ institutions emphasise the death or regrowth.
The institutions often justify this embarrassingly high coral cover as just “weed coral”. But the type of coral that has exploded over the last few years is acropora, which is the most susceptible to hot-water bleaching. How can we have record amounts of the type of coral that should have been killed, again and again, from bleaching? The acropora takes five to ten years to regrow if it is killed.
There are two conclusions that must be drawn. First, not much coral has been killed by climate change bleaching – at least not compared to the capacity of coral to regrow. Second, the science institutions are not entirely trustworthy, and are in need of major reform.
And not just with regard to GBR or climate science. It is well recognised that most areas of scientific study are suffering a problem of reliability, which is damaging the reputation of science itself. It is well accepted that around half of the recent peer-reviewed science literature is flawed. Is there any other profession with such a high failure rate?
As he points out, this year’s cover is the fourth highest on record.
The BBC do comment:
In the latest AIMS survey results, the most affected coral species were the Acropora, which are susceptible to heat stress and a favoured food of the crown-of-thorns starfish.
"These corals are the fastest to grow and are the first to go," AIMS research lead Dr Mike Emslie told ABC News.
"The Great Barrier Reef is such a beautiful, iconic place, it’s really, really worth fighting for. And if we can give it a chance, it’s shown an inherent ability to recover," he said.
Which is of course a no-brainer. Well established species, coral or otherwise, tend to be hardier. The rapid growth of Acropora in recent years was always going to be susceptible to rapid bleaching too.
The reef as a whole is clearly extremely healthy, with greater coverage than for most of the last forty years.
But you won’t see that on the BBC.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
August 6, 2025 at 08:32AM
Audrey Streb
DCNF Energy Reporter
New York will soon force developers to build new buildings that can only use electricity for temperature control and appliances, which will further strain the state’s electric grid if it’s fully implemented, according to energy policy experts and some state officials.
Starting in January 2026, the “All-Electric Building Act” will require most new buildings to run mainly on electricity and ban gas appliances, with only a few exceptions. New York utility companies are reportedly struggling to meet the state’s harsh electrification mandate that could worsen existing power shortages if the policy is fully enforced, some energy experts and state officials who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation warned.
“New York’s energy mandates are forcing the shutdown of reliable power plants faster than we’re bringing new sources online, and that’s creating a serious capacity shortfall. As a result, housing developments across the state are being delayed or canceled,” Republican New York State Senator Pamlea Helming told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Not because of funding or local opposition, but because there simply isn’t enough power to support them. When the state pushes all-electric mandates without building the infrastructure to match, it drives up costs and makes it harder to build the attainable housing our communities desperately need.” (RELATED: Forget Stoves! The Biden Admin Is Working Overtime To Phase Out All Your Gas Appliances
Helming has written about the struggle to develop new housing in her district, noting that the all-electric mandate is placing pressure on utility companies and is complicated by New York’s weak power grid. As things stand, New York has enacted several regulations on appliances, has a 2040 green energy mandate and has some of the highest average utility bills in the U.S., according to data from Energy Information Administration (EIA).
A major grid watchdog and New York’s grid operator both noted that the state has major projected electricity needs that it may be unable to meet. New York is phasing out fossil fuel-fired power plants to meet emissions targets without replacing them with carbon-free sources fast enough, according to the New York Independent System Operator, the state’s grid manager.
Representatives for both New York State Electric and Gas (NYSEG) and Rochester Gas and Electric (RG&E) told a local news outlet that “unforeseen and unprecedented demand” in the region has complicated their businesses. Jared Simpson, the town supervisor in Canandaigua, New York, told WXXI News that utilities are dissuaded from electrification due to electricity shortages.
Simpson reportedly said that when developers were grappling with a power shortage, RG&E and state officials told them that the solution was to “take out the (electric vehicle) chargers, put in gas heat, put in gas stoves, put in gas dryers.”
“The utility companies have to go through a pretty tough adversarial process to get their rates and their spending plans approved, and there is a decent chance that some of the places that are now choke points for building up the grid were subject to different constraints by state government,” Ken Girardin, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told the DCNF. “That is to say, the utility companies wanted to spend more on the grid and regulators didn’t let them.”
As New York phases out power plants and fails to replace aging energy infrastructure fast enough, its policies are marching the state toward a serious electricity problem, Girardin argued. He also said that the electrification goals will negatively impact housing and school districts.
“Eventually, the bill is going to come due,” Girardin said. “Developers either aren’t going to be able to get electricity for projects, or the numbers on those projects are going to make them much less attractive.”
The “All-Electric Building Act” was signed into law in 2023 before the code was then approved in the state budget, according to a local news outlet WGRZ. The bill specifically applies to buildings less than seven stories and it carves out some exemptions for buildings like fire stations, hospitals and restaurants, according to the bill text.
The regulations would not apply to homes that already use gas stoves or gas-powered heating, though a full electric transition will eventually be required in the state, according to officials. (RELATED: New York Rolls Out ‘Shakedown’ Law Forcing Companies To Atone For Climate Change With Cash)
“Full electric will have to be every building at some point,” Democratic New York State Sen. Liz Kruger said, according to WGRZ. New York’s Scoping plan calls for zero-emission technologies and a “gas system transition.”
Much of the state’s electricity stems from natural gas, according to NYISO. The Empire State’s green energy mandate threatens its grid reliability and will add costs to ratepayers, experts previously told the DCNF.
“Buildings have 40 percent of our state emissions so by cutting out building emissions, this is going to be an incredible step forward for our environmental goals,” Democrat Assemblymember Emily Gallagher said, according to WGRZ. “This was a real battle to get passed.”
While some officials are celebrating the impending transition, some community members are concerned about how the new building code will impact costs.
“New York State … it’s been difficult to get anyone to really listen to any logic on the problems that this poses to us as builders. It was going to create about a $20,000 increase in the cost to build a home,” Buffalo Niagara Building Association President Phil Nanula told WGRZ.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 8 that calls for the attorney general to identify any state laws that may be unconstitutional or “otherwise unenforceable.”
Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Gallagher, NYSEG and RG&E did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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via Watts Up With That?
August 6, 2025 at 08:01AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 