57.01077 -3.39735 Met Office assessed CIMO Class 3 **INSTALLED “27th JUNE 2005**

Braemar in Aberdeenshire is somewhat notorious for jointly holding the record for the UK’s coldest ever temperature (with Altnaharra) of minus 27.2°C on 11/2/1895 and eighty seven years later on 10/2/1982. Of course those dates obviously cannot relate to Braemar No 2 as it simply did not exist on either occasion. So why the Orwellian headline and what is going on?

Firstly a close up look at the Braemar No 2 reveals a very modern site by the A93 main road on flat land in a river valley at the bottom of a slope. It is over 100 metres from Clunie Water, a tributary of the River Dee and sits in open countryside. There are no obvious external heat sources and the classification as only Class 3 seems rather harsh. Heathrow Airport weather station is rated as Class 3 – are the Met Office claiming 1,250 hectares of tarmac, runways, buildings at one of the world’s busiest airports are the same equivalent of this picturesque Scottish rural location?

The 30 metre circled area shown below does include some of the roadway but it really does not look to be carrying any significant traffic. If this site were rated Class 2, and thus fully reliable, it would be difficult to argue against that assessment. Of course nowhere in Braemar is likely to record unduly hot – the all time area maximum was only 30°C almost 50 years ago in August 1975.

So what is the Orwellian headline about? To begin with, the Met Office has some rather unscientific ways of representing history. From their website https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/historic-station-data can be found long term data from selected sites around the UK – Braemar no 2 appears as below:

Obviously Braemar No 2 cannot supply data back to 1959 as it was only installed in 2005. The Met Office has thus “merged” data from another site, but why only 1959? The “other site” was simply known as Braemar with its CEDA Archive freely available online and temperature data back to 1857. https://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-midas-open/data/uk-daily-temperature-obs/dataset-version-202407/aberdeenshire/00147_braemar/qc-version-1

The famous, original and record setting Braemar was a considerable distance away in a completely different climatological setting (almost certainly Class 5) and originally came into being 103 years before 1959 in 1856. In fact this earlier site was in a colder location despite being in the village centre. From

https://www.aberdeenlive.news/news/aberdeen-news/aberdeenshires-weather-records-you-often-6512148

The original station was in the area below.

The caption to the above online image courtesy https://www.flickr.com/photos/sneachda/ reads:

“Braemar – site of old weather station on right. Queen Victoria’s husband – Prince Albert – was a dynamic young man interested in many subjects, climatology being one of them. The Braemar weather station record, started at his behest, is one of the longest in the UK. It still runs today, having commenced in the mid-1800s.The meteorological instruments were for a long period located near the white building on the right. On a visit in 1964, I recall seeing the bank manager cross the road from the bank (on the left) logbook in hand, to take the daily 0900 GMT reading.”

This original site (numbered DCNN 1215) was over 600 metres from its replacement and in a completely different setting. The Met Office themselves would not have had to renumber the site over such a relocation distance if the surroundings were climatologically similar. They did so because they were completely different.

“Over time certain instruments, or the whole enclosure, may be relocated some distance away from the original site. Where the distance moved is small, the observations obtained from the new site may have exactly the same climatological characteristics as previously and it makes sense to regard them as coming from the same source or station distinguished by certain identifiers. Where the distance moved is large, or, where the exposure at the new site is sufficiently different that a detectable impact on the measured climatology is judged likely, it is appropriate that observations from the new site are labelled by a different set of identifiers.” {my bold}

For reasons I find difficult to understand, the Met Office has chosen to highlight a spurious merging of two notably different data sets for an illogically defined period that fails to represent either site. I have opted to highlight this for the second Orwellian reason.

In my open letter to Peter Kyle and my review of Dungeness I referred to “Climate Averages” stations which specified coordinates, elevations and purposes of selected sites. Of 302 shown, 103 no longer exist. The subsequent highlighting of this point via articles in the Daily Sceptic, Toby Young (Free Speech Union) and very many other blogs ultimately resulted in, literally, millions of views worldwide.

This was the original link – https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-climate-averages. However, clicking on that above link now leads to a significantly modified page that has been renamed to “Location-specific long-term averages” as here: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/location-specific-long-term-averages

Critically important is that coordinates, elevations and definition of site type have all been removed with numerous caveats on the front page. Because of this, the long term averages location identifier of Braemar No 2 is now no longer shown and the general public have no way of realising its data is only under 20 years old i.e. less than a 30 year climate reporting period and not realistically a long term site. They are being misled into believing that over a 65 year data record indicates a warming trend rather and are unaware of the subtle data manipulation.

Thankfully, the “Wayback machine” is (for now at least) independent and has archived the original site for future reference. https://web.archive.org/web/20240807063354/https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-climate-averages

In conclusion, the Met Office has made a number of “adjustments” to online pages subsequent to recent Surface Station Project postings. It is clear that, though they decline to respond or comment on either postings or my letter, they are taking actions in response to them.

Re-writing the history of the past by those who have the present control, seems to be their means to determine the future.

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December 7, 2024 at 05:01AM

If wind power was so cheap, you would think they would be queuing up to build them:

via Watts Up With That?

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December 7, 2024 at 04:06AM

Wikipedia’s page on the runaway greenhouse effect, which says ‘This likely happened in the early history of Venus’, may be due for revision. It likely did not, according to this new research, which may disappoint some climate alarmists.
– – –
A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbor was once much more like Earth than it is today, says Phys.org.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere and inferred that its interior is too dry today for there ever to have been enough water for oceans to exist at its surface.

Instead, the planet has likely been a scorching, inhospitable world for its entire history.

The results, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, have implications for understanding Earth’s uniqueness, and for the search for life on planets outside our solar system. While many exoplanets are Venus-like, the study suggests that astronomers should narrow their focus to exoplanets which are more like Earth.

From a distance, Venus and Earth look like siblings: it is almost identical in size and is a rocky planet like Earth. But up close, Venus is more like an evil twin: it is covered with thick clouds of sulfuric acid, and its surface has a mean temperature close to 500°C.

Despite these extreme conditions, for decades, astronomers have been investigating whether Venus once had liquid oceans capable of supporting life, or whether some mysterious form of ‘aerial’ life exists in its thick clouds now.

“We won’t know for sure whether Venus can or did support life until we send probes at the end of this decade,” said first author Tereza Constantinou, a Ph.D. student at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “But given it likely never had oceans, it is hard to imagine Venus ever having supported Earth-like life, which requires liquid water.”
. . .
There are two primary theories on how conditions on Venus may have evolved since its formation 4.6 billion years ago. The first is that conditions on the surface of Venus were once temperate enough to support liquid water, but a runaway greenhouse effect caused by widespread volcanic activity caused the planet to get hotter and hotter.

The second theory is that Venus was born hot, and liquid water has never been able to condense at the surface.

“Both of those theories are based on climate models, but we wanted to take a different approach based on observations of Venus’ current atmospheric chemistry,” said Constantinou.
. . .
“If Venus was habitable in the past, it would mean other planets we have already found might also be habitable,” said Constantinou. “Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope are best at studying the atmospheres of planets close to their host star, like Venus. But if Venus was never habitable, then it makes Venus-like planets elsewhere less likely candidates for habitable conditions or life.

“We would have loved to find that Venus was once a planet much closer to our own, so it’s kind of sad in a way to find out that it wasn’t, but ultimately it’s more useful to focus the search on planets that are mostly likely to be able to support life—at least life as we know it.”

Full article here.

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December 7, 2024 at 03:47AM

The Australian electricity grid is not-fit-for-purpose. And failure is being normalized.

via CFACT

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December 7, 2024 at 02:08AM