Daily News 7 Jan 2025

Cardington WMO 03559 – Met Office drifting into Surrealism

52.10466 -0.4216 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 2/ Met Office graded “GOOD” Installed 1/1/1952

Cardington is most certainly not your average Met Office weather station site. This is one of their most important sites in the entire UK being the principal Meteorological Research Unit. The story with Cardington is further indication, as seen at Cawood, of quite bizarre data presentation to the public.

The above description goes on to detail this site has just about every onshore and atmospheric measuring device available to modern meteorology. As well as major research and development it is also a training centre.

The screen itself is very well sited – Class 2 almost seems a bit harsh though almost certainly correct. Again, surprisingly, it is only Met Office rated as “Good” (Cawood was Class 1 and Excellent) given it is such a high profile establishment. The 100 metre circled area below looks to be clear of significant intrusions. Despite these marginal mark downs the readings from Cardington should be perfectly representative of the area and good quality for compiling the historic temperature record.

The difference with Cawood is that Cardington is an automatic station directly operated and controlled by the Met Office with onsite staffing and much more sophisticated than the former manual more basic unit. Its readings are available hourly online and the Met Office themselves are supplied with data on a minute by minute basis.

However, again, when I checked on the “Climate Averages” for the time series of 1960 through to 2020 (and ongoing) for fully equipped flagship site Cardington I was presented with this.

Whilst there was just possibly an excuse for not showing Cawood (being a manual site operated by a third party) there can be no rational reason to avoid simply providing unadulterated (non homogenised) rolling 30 years averages directly from such a sophisticated facility as Cardington.

What possible rational reason is there for failing to show a long term quality site like Cardington and instead quoting a remote (23 miles away) site like Northampton, Moulton Park which was only installed in 1976 and CLOSED DOWN in 2018. In what other business or industry (I hesitate to use the term science) would anyone ever quote artificially derived data from somewhere else in lieu of hard real world numbers for the immediate location? Do real numbers indicate something different to those the Met Office would “prefer” the public to understand?

The Met Office seems to be operating in a surreal world of its own invention that is getting ever more remote from reality. It is now overdue for a reality check – perhaps the license payer funded “watchdog” could start actually verifying.

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January 7, 2025 at 04:55AM

Daily News 7 Jan 2025

Met Office Try To Shut Down Debate On Junk Temperature Measurements

By Paul Homewood

Chris Morrison has the latest on how the Met Office, in league with the green blob, are trying to shut down debate on the junk weather station scandal:

After a year of damaging revelations about the state of the Met Office’s temperature measuring network, the Green Blob-funded ‘fact-checker’ Science Feedback has sprung to the defence of the state-funded U.K. weather service. It has published a long ‘fact check’ seeking to exonerate practices that have recently come to light including the locating of stations with huge heat corrupted ‘uncertainties’ and the publication of invented data from 103 non-existent sites. Inept is a word that springs to mind. At one point, Science Feedback justifies the estimation of data at the non-existent stations by referring to the hastily changed Met Office explanation for station/location long-term averages. The original and now deleted Met Office webpage referenced station names and provided single location coordinates including one improbable siting next to the sea on Dover beach. This would appear to be a new low in the world of so-called fact-checking – designating copy as ‘misleading’ based on an explanation changed after the article was published.

Full story here.

Instead of promulgating misinformation and shutting down debate, maybe the Met Office should do what NOAA did two decades ago and set up a new, high quality weather station network.

They called theirs the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), which was introduced because of biases in the previous network, which is still operational:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/overview.html

NOAA’s Site Selection Criteria puts the Met Office’s shoddy network to shame:

It really is that simple, Met Office!

Just get on and do it.

We know they won’t of course, because they are only interested in their Net Zero propaganda.

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January 7, 2025 at 04:14AM

Daily News 7 Jan 2025

Is Wind Power Cheaper Than Gas?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

OFFSHORE WIND POWER V GAS POWER?

Which is cheaper – offshore wind or gas power?

We always seem to go round in circles when we discuss this! Politicians and the wind lobby always refer to the official Levelised Costs, last published by the BEIS in 2023, often dishonestly including Carbon Pricing in the cost of gas power, even though it is a TAX, not a COST.

Others point out that you cannot simply compare levelised costs, as they do not include the indirect costs associated with intermittent renewables, particularly the need to pay for standby capacity.

In fact the only valid comparison is to compare the TOTAL COST of wind power, with the FUEL COST of CCGT power stations. The latter, of course, will still have to be fully manned and maintained whilst on standby, so those costs are in essence fixed. The only extra cost they incur when actually generating is fuel itself.

The following analysis is based wholly on the assumptions used in the BEIS Electricity Generation Costs report, referred to above, and other official data.

In 2023, gas power supplied 101 TWh, a third of total electricity in Great Britain.

The latest government mid-range projections for the price of gas are around 70p/therm, which is £24/MWh. With a fuel efficiency of 53%, that works out at £45/MWh of electricity produced, or an annual total of £4.5bn.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fossil-fuel-price-assumptions-2024

Now we come on to offshore wind power.

The BEIS costings assumed capital costs of £2200/kW – this is the top of their range, which is more realistic, given the massive increase in strike prices offered in last summer’s CfD auction. To generate 101 TWh, we would need 26 GW of new offshore wind capacity, which is more than we have presently. That works out at a total capital cost of £57 billion.

To this can be added the operating costs of offshore wind, which the BEIS estimated at £19/MWh.

So over a life of fifteen years, operating costs plus capital come to £86 billion. The cost of natural gas over the same period to produce the same amount of electricity would be £67 billion.

Even then wind power costs are understated, because we should add on the cost of grid upgrades, projected at over £100 billion, or at least the appropriate share for the extra 26 GW.

We know that wind power already on the system costs considerably more than the BEIS’ optimistic calculations. But even using these for new wind farms, it is clear that CCGT is much cheaper.