Spain has a long history of catastrophic floods, but George Monbiot implies that they can be prevented by vandalizing the Mona Lisa. Study of historical flood events on Spanish rivers using documentary data
via Real Climate Science
October 31, 2024 at 06:59PM
According to the graphs in previous two posts, wind energy was on average (annual as well as monthly) the most stable intermittent power source. There was also slightly more wind in winter (when demand is highest) than in summer (when demand is lowest), which theoretically may result in lower storage requirements. This in stark contrast with solar which is much less prevalent in winter and abundant in summer, thus entirely out of phase with demand and therefore the need for curtailment during summer and backup during winter. One might be tempted to come to the conclusion that wind energy alone would be the better intermittent power source, so why even bother with solar?
Let’s just test this theory. Would wind fare better on is own or is solar really needed in he mix?
First some assumptions:
Storage will be the bottleneck, so the power source that needs the smallest storage capacity without experiencing deficits over a one year period at our latitude wins this battle.
Let’s just jump in. This is how wind electricity production of 1.5 times demand looks like:
That is of course only one side of the story. Production higher than demand will be:
(otherwise this amount of overproduction would fry the grid).
This is how it would look like when overproduction is creamed off:
The orange lines below the blue line means production lower than demand and this has to filled in by storage. The challenge is to dimension the storage capacity so it would not be drawn empty during the year (no blackouts).
Fiddling with the storage capacity, a capacity of 5000 GWh ensured that there were no deficits over the entire year. Meaning that wind and storage alone could manage the demand. More, there wasn’t even a need to have something in storage initially because there was already surplus at the get go. This because there is more wind during winter at our latitude (the start of the year is in winter) and January 1 is part of the Christmas/New Year holiday with less demand than average in winter.
This is how it looks like in the storage:
Although it came very close in September, there were no deficits in the simulation.
When storage is full and wind exceeds demand, the overproduction will be curtailed. These are the periods when curtailment of power was necessary:
Curtailment was mostly necessary in the beginning and at the end of the year (winter and early spring), but there was some curtailment in August too.
Now let’s compare with the same production, but this time adding solar to the mix. There was also no need for initial storage. Although solar production is close of it minimum at the beginning of the year, there was still enough wind to get something in storage before it was needed later on.
This is how intermittent production of 1.5 times demand looks like:
And this is only the production that wasn’t stored or curtailed:
The view into storage shows that it came close to a deficit in around February:
This most likely because February 2023 experienced less than average wind (see previous post) combined with a traditionally low production of solar at that time of the year.
There was however more curtailment, especially during summer:
This is most likely solar production because it is solar that is out of sync with demand (lots of it during summer when demand is lowest and hardly anything during winter when demand is highest).
Here are the numbers:
| Parameter | Wind | Solar + Wind |
|---|---|---|
| Demand 2023 (GWh) | 78,866.65 | |
| Demand x 1.5 (GWh) | 118,299.97 | |
| Simulated production (GWh) | 118,299.97 | |
| Initial in storage (GWh) | 0 | 0 |
| Maximum storage (GWh) | 5,000 | 1,900 |
| Curtailed (GWh) | 28,677.27 | 33,511.58 |
| Conversion losses (GWh) | 5,756.06 | 4,021.74 |
| Parameter | Wind | Solar + Wind |
|---|---|---|
| Demand 2023 (GWh) | 78,866.65 | |
| Demand x 3.4 (GWh) | 268,146.61 | |
| Simulated production (GWh) | 268,146.61 | |
| Initial in storage (GWh) | 0 | 0 |
| Maximum storage (GWh) | 1,550 | 500 |
| Curtailed (GWh) | 184,661.64 | 186,910.53 |
| Conversion losses (GWh) | 3,068.32 | 1,869.43 |
via Trust, yet verify
October 31, 2024 at 05:54PM
Overview from CFR. COP29 Summit in Baku: What to Expect Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Negotiators from across the globe will gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the twenty-ninth annual UN climate change conference on November 11. COP29 marks the midpoint of the “COP Presidencies Troika,” a collaborative effort between the United Arab Emirates (UAE, host to COP28) and Brazil (host to COP30 in 2025) aimed at accelerating progress toward the 1.5°C goal. Unlike COP28 in Dubai last year, which hosted a record hundred thousand attendees, COP29 will be smaller, with Baku expected to host around fifty thousand participants.
The selection of Azerbaijan as the host country has raised concerns about the credibility and integrity of the COP process. COP29 marks the third time a significant fossil fuel-producing country has hosted the conference, and the second time in two years. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has announced plans to increase gas production in part to satisfy European Union (EU) demands and referred to the country’s oil and gas reserves as “a gift from God.”
Reducing emissions and increasing green energy. The presidency has put forward a series of commitments for investing in renewable energy, such as a Global Energy Storage and Grids Pledge, which aims to enhance energy infrastructure and storage capabilities worldwide, an ambitious Hydrogen Declaration, and a Declaration on Reducing Methane from Organic Waste. With the Green Digital Action Declaration, COP29 leadership seeks to reduce emissions in the information and communication sectors. The agenda, however, makes no direct mention of a transition from fossil fuels.
Building climate resilience. The COP presidency has put forth a climate initiative for farmers and a declaration calling for integrated approaches to combating climate threats to water basins and ecosystems. Additionally, Baku aims to present the Initiative on Human Development for Climate Resilience, which focuses on education, skills, health, and well-being, and the COP29 Multisectoral Actions Pathways (MAP) Declaration that aims to enhance urban climate resilience.
New climate finance targets. Nations are expected to replace the previous $100 billion annual commitment to developing countries from the 2009 Copenhagen Accord. The new target, known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), will be under discussion at November’s COP and is intended to take effect from 2025 onwards. A 2022 report [PDF] by the Independent High-level Expert Group on Climate Finance found that developing countries need around $1 trillion per year by 2025, and $2.4 trillion by 2030 to meet their climate finance needs. Among the most contentious issues that remain are how much money developed nations will provide, and who should provide climate finance.
Since there is a big push on climate funding, maybe they could get to the bottom of this:
Maybe donors are put off by no one knowing who gets the money and for what it is spent. And while they are investigating, how about understanding Energy Return on Investment (EROI): you know, the notion that an energy project is worth doing if the energy produced is greater than energy spent. The windmills in the logo at the top reminded me of this:
Actually, climate hysteria is like a seasonal sickness. Each year a contagion of anxiety and fear is created by disinformation going viral in both legacy and social media in the run up to the annual autumnal COP. Since the climatists have put themselves at the controls of the formidable US federal government, we can expect the public will be hugely hosed with alarms over the next few months. Before the distress signals go full tilt, individuals need to inoculate themselves against the false claims, in order to build some herd immunity against the nonsense the media will promulgate. This post is offered as a means to that end.
Back in 2015 in the run up to Paris COP, French mathematicians published a thorough critique of the raison d’etre of the whole crusade. They said:
Fighting Global Warming is Absurd, Costly and Pointless.
The prestigious Société de Calcul Mathématique (Society for Mathematical Calculation) issued a detailed 195-page White Paper presenting a blistering point-by-point critique of the key dogmas of global warming. The synopsis with links to the entire document is at COP Briefing for Realists
Even without attending to their documentation, you can tell they are right because all the media climate hype is concentrated against those three points.
Finding: Nothing unusual is happening with our weather and climate.
Hype: Every metric or weather event is “unprecedented,” or “worse than we thought.”
Finding: Proposed solutions will cost many trillions of dollars for little effect or benefit.
Hype: Zero carbon will lead the world to do the right thing. Anyway, the planet must be saved at any cost.
Finding: Nature operates without caring what humans do or think.
Hype: Any destructive natural event is blamed on humans burning fossil fuels.
How the Media Throws Up Flak to Defend False Suppositions
Billions of dollars have been spent researching any and all negative effects from a warming world: Everything from Acne to Zika virus. A recent Climate Report repeats the usual litany of calamities to be feared and avoided by submitting to IPCC demands. The evidence does not support these claims. An example:
It is scientifically established that human activities produce GHG emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere and the oceans, resulting in warming of Earth’s surface and the oceans, acidification of the oceans, increased variability of climate, with a higher incidence of extreme weather events, and other changes in the climate.
Moreover, leading experts believe that there is already more than enough excess heat in the climate system to do severe damage and that 2C of warming would have very significant adverse effects, including resulting in multi-meter sea level rise.
Experts have observed an increased incidence of climate-related extreme weather events, including increased frequency and intensity of extreme heat and heavy precipitation events and more severe droughts and associated heatwaves. Experts have also observed an increased incidence of large forest fires; and reduced snowpack affecting water resources in the western U.S. The most recent National Climate Assessment projects these climate impacts will continue to worsen in the future as global temperatures increase.
Alarming Weather and Wildfires
But: Weather is not more extreme.
And Wildfires were worse in the past.
But: Sea Level Rise is not accelerating.
Litany of Changes
Seven of the ten hottest years on record have occurred within the last decade; wildfires are at an all-time high, while Arctic Sea ice is rapidly diminishing.
We are seeing one-in-a-thousand-year floods with astonishing frequency.
When it rains really hard, it’s harder than ever.
We’re seeing glaciers melting, sea level rising.
The length and the intensity of heatwaves has gone up dramatically.
Plants and trees are flowering earlier in the year. Birds are moving polewards.
We’re seeing more intense storms.
But: Arctic Ice has not declined since 2007.
But: All of these are within the range of past variability.
In fact our climate is remarkably stable, compared to the range of daily temperatures during a year where I live.
And many aspects follow quasi-60 year cycles.
Here it is blithely assumed that the UN can rule the seas to stop rising, heat waves to cease, and Arctic ice to grow (though why we would want that is debatable). All this will be achieved by leaving fossil fuels in the ground and powering civilization with windmills and solar panels. While admitting that our way of life depends on fossil fuels, they ignore the inadequacy of renewable energy sources at their present immaturity.
An Example:
The choice between incurring manageable costs now and the incalculable, perhaps even irreparable, burden Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children will face if Defendants fail to rapidly transition to a non-fossil fuel economy is clear. While the full costs of the climate damages that would result from maintaining a fossil fuel-based economy may be incalculable, there is already ample evidence concerning the lower bound of such costs, and with these minimum estimates, it is already clear that the cost of transitioning to a low/no carbon economy are far less than the benefits of such a transition. No rational calculus could come to an alternative conclusion. Defendants must act with all deliberate speed and immediately cease the subsidization of fossil fuels and any new fossil fuel projects, and implement policies to rapidly transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels.
But CO2 relation to Temperature is Inconsistent.
But: The planet is greener because of rising CO2.
But: Modern nations (G20) depend on fossil fuels for nearly 90% of their energy.
But: Renewables are not ready for prime time.
People need to know that adding renewables to an electrical grid presents both technical and economic challenges. Experience shows that adding intermittent power more than 10% of the baseload makes precarious the reliability of the supply. South Australia is demonstrating this with a series of blackouts when the grid cannot be balanced. Germany got to a higher % by dumping its excess renewable generation onto neighboring countries until the EU finally woke up and stopped them. Texas got up to 29% by dumping onto neighboring states, and some like Georgia are having problems.
But more dangerous is the way renewables destroy the economics of electrical power. Seasoned energy analyst Gail Tverberg writes:
In fact, I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today. There are too many costs outside building the devices themselves. It is these secondary costs that are problematic. Also, the presence of intermittent electricity disrupts competitive prices, leading to electricity prices that are far too low for other electricity providers, including those providing electricity using nuclear or natural gas. The tiny contribution of wind and solar to grid electricity cannot make up for the loss of more traditional electricity sources due to low prices.
These issues are discussed in more detail in the post Climateers Tilting at Windmills
An Example:
Other potential examples include agricultural losses. Whether or not insurance
reimburses farmers for their crops, there can be food shortages that lead to higher food
prices (that will be borne by consumers, that is, Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children).
There is a further risk that as our climate and land use pattern changes, disease vectors
may also move (e.g., diseases formerly only in tropical climates move northward).36 This
could lead to material increases in public health costs
But: Actual climate zones are local and regional in scope, and they show little boundary change.
But: Ice cores show that it was warmer in the past, not due to humans.
The hype is produced by computer programs designed to frighten and distract children and the uninformed. For example, there was mention above of “multi-meter” sea level rise. It is all done with computer models. For example, below is San Francisco. More at USCS Warnings of Coastal Floodings
In addition, there is no mention that GCMs projections are running about twice as hot as observations.
Omitted is the fact GCMs correctly replicate tropospheric temperature observations only when CO2 warming is turned off.
In the effort to proclaim scientific certainty, neither the media nor IPCC discuss the lack of warming since the 1998 El Nino, despite two additional El Ninos in 2010 and 2016.
Further they exclude comparisons between fossil fuel consumption and temperature changes. The legal methodology for discerning causation regarding work environments or medicine side effects insists that the correlation be strong and consistent over time, and there be no confounding additional factors. As long as there is another equally or more likely explanation for a set of facts, the claimed causation is unproven. Such is the null hypothesis in legal terms: Things happen for many reasons unless you can prove one reason is dominant.
Finally, advocates and IPCC are picking on the wrong molecule. The climate is controlled not by CO2 but by H20. Oceans make climate through the massive movement of energy involved in water’s phase changes from solid to liquid to gas and back again. From those heat transfers come all that we call weather and climate: Clouds, Snow, Rain, Winds, and Storms.
Esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen ended a very fine recent presentation with this description of the climate system:
I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.
Climate warms and cools without any help from humans.
Warming is good and cooling is bad.
The hypothetical warming from CO2 would be a good thing.
via Science Matters
October 31, 2024 at 04:44PM
On the 19th July 2024, following correct protocol, I emailed my constituency MP, Rosie Duffield, asking her to forward a report I had produced onto Peter Kyle MP (above) in his capacity of Secretary of State for Science, Information and Technology responsible for the Met Office. Ms Duffield confirmed this was forwarded and I also received an acknowledgement from Peter Kyle’s constituency office.
Despite further polite follow ups direct to Mr Kyle and further enquiries via the BSIT department’s Science Advisors, I have received no response from anyone whatsoever. I feel a response was warranted hence in the absence of any I publish below the full text of my original email. This is an open letter and anyone is free to draw from it or forward all or any part of it wherever they wish.
“Dear Mr Kyle
Investigation into accuracy of Meteorological Office Data
I have extensively researched aspects regarding the accuracy and scientific validity of data produced by the UK Meteorological Office (Met Office). I have discovered significant inaccuracies and potential misrepresentation of hard data produced by the Met Office which calls into question its validity and requires an independent investigation to correct.
I precis below the main points.
Firstly I considered how “Climate Averages” data was presented by the Met Office.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-climate-averages
This details 302 sites. As an example, either click on the map or type in “Dungeness”. You will be directed to a “nearest site” called “Dungeness” giving accurate map co-ordinates, elevation and a description as “Observing Site”
Any reasonable person viewing this (a student for example) would assume there is a site there and the 30 year rolling averages from 1960 to 2020 were both “observed” and “data” – notably quoted to the second decimal place of a degree.
However, there is NO weather station at Dungeness – it closed in 1986 – i.e. 38 years ago.
For these last 38 years there have been no observations, thus no data recorded at Dungeness. All the figures are fabricated in scientific terms.
Through Freedom of Information request (FOI) I obtained the details of which stations actually still exist as attached excel spread sheet.
Of the 302 sites quoted, over one third (103) do NOT exist. The Met Office declined to advise me exactly how or from where the alleged “data” was derived for these 102 non-existent sites.
In my home county of Kent, 4 of the 8 sites shown are fiction (Dungeness, Folkestone, Dover, Gillingham) and all produce different “averages”. Referring back to Dungeness, the nearest open Met Office Weather Station sites are over 25 miles away.
There is no plausible scientific purpose in the invention of numbers for non-existent sites which are falsely posing as authentic locations.
How would any reasonable observer (i.e. the example student) know that the data was not real and simply “made up” by a government agency?
Secondly, Long term “Historic Data“
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/historic-station-data
The above indicates 37 long term sites quoting monthly “Data”. Note that 3 sites on the map are coloured blue with the key indicating these stations have closed, the remainder are coloured orange indicating “open” stations.
Any reasonable person would therefore assume the orange marked sites were “open” stations as stated.
However, for example, go to Lowestoft and “view data”. Whilst figures run from 1914, all figures from 2010 are marked with an asterisk indicating they are “Estimated” – the station closed in 2010 – i.e.14 years ago.
What scientific organisation would continue to “estimate” figures for over 14 years and counting? What possible scientific purpose could such “estimation” serve?
The Met Office has again declined to advise me either how these estimates are arrived at or why they do so.
The stations at Nairn Druim, Paisley and Newton Rigg are similarly closed but still reporting “estimated” monthly data. It should also be noted that even those stations marked as closed continued to report “Estimated” numbers beyond their closure date.
Why would any scientific organisation feel the need to publish what can only genuinely be described as fiction? No scientific purpose can possibly be served by fabrication.
These above two issues of “Climate Averages” and “Historic Station Data” clearly demonstrate the Met Office are publishing numbers which are neither real nor observed and thus cannot be described as data.
This moves me onto aspects of exactly how the Met Office observes and collects its raw data.
Weather Station siting.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is part of the United Nations Organistaion (UN), to which almost all national meteorological agencies report their data for climate reporting purposes.
The WMO recently standardised the weather station location requirements for Climate data recording purposes.
The UK Met Office was a significant partner to the formulation of this standard which was ultimately codified by the International Standards Organisation as ISO/WMO standard 19289:2014(E) as detailed below.
WMO rules indicate that only sites meeting CIMO Classes 1 or 2 should be used for Climate Reporting purposes. Class 3 sites have known errors caused by siting of 1°C, Class 4 sites error margins of 2°C and Class 5 sites have known error margins up to 5° C.
Consequently, Classes 3 to 5 stations should NOT be used for climate reporting purposes. Classes 4 and 5 are generally considered to have no better than “Junk” status in climate reporting terms though quite possibly acceptable for their original installed purposes such as immediate aviation advice, local agriculture, local transport etc.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-synoptic-and-climate-stations
It required a Freedom of Information request for me to obtain from the Met Office the list of their Climate and Synoptic reporting weather stations by CIMO Class as attached.
This list indicates that of 384 climate reporting stations just 52 (13.7%) fall into Classes 1 & 2.
A further 30 (7.8% of total) sites are Class 3
187 sites (48.7% of total ) are Class 4
112 sites (29.2% of total) are Class 5
Almost 85% of all Met Office sites are NOT deemed acceptable for climate data reporting purposes by the World Meteorological Organisation and International Standards Organisation stated requirements.
It is worth noting that the Met Office claims to use its own separate station monitoring standards but does not give plausible reasons why these should override WMO standards. They do not demonstrate any greater level of suitability for climate reporting than the CIMO standards.
N.B. The Met Office have confirmed the default classification on their records for all their stations is set at Class 1 unless manually adjusted.
On receipt of the attached list I personally challenged the CIMO classification of the Hastings site. The Met Office agreed with my personal site inspection and adjusted their records to Class 4. I have subsequently challenged some of their CIMO ratings of other sites – unfortunately a senior Met Office manager (Karl Shephedson) has since reneged on any offer of discussions on this subject and the Met Office no longer seems willing to openly engage with me.
I have produced a dossier of exceptionally poorly sited weather stations which include (amongst other problematical issues)
Co-located with major National Grid Sub-Stations.
In walled kitchen gardens and botanical gardens specifically designed to produce artificially increased temperatures and micro climates.
In agricultural sites with continuously changing surroundings such as poly tunnels.
Surrounded by newly constructed solar farms.
In Zoological Gardens adjacent animal enclosures
In Car Parks adjacent parking bays.
In domestic back gardens alongside sheds, barbecues and general garden paraphernalia.
Sewage and water treatment plants.
Aviation sites.
It would be overly burdensome at this stage to detail all the problem sites but, for now, here are just a few examples using google aerial imagery/META.
Bingley No 2/Bradford West Electricity Sub-Station. The weather station compound is marked by the red kite. Taking the readings downwind of the waste heat from 400kV electricity transformers seems highly unlikely to record natural conditions.
Dyce, Aberdeen. The red kite again marks the weather station compound just to the left of the Airbus A320 engine exhaust.
As another observation here is the “Facebook/Meta” page of Floors Castle Walled garden weather station. The principal purpose of a walled kitchen garden is to artificially create a warmer micro climate than the natural surroundings. This site was temporarily awarded the Scottish all time record high temperature in 2022 only to be beaten by a former RAF airfield site at Charterhall shortly afterwards.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1893457610801591
These above are by no means extremes. The Met Office claim all the above sites actually meet Class 4 – error margin by siting of 2°C .
Consider just how bad the 112 Class 5 assessed sites actually must be.
NEW SITES
Whilst it may be understandable that the Met Office has some legacy old sites in locations which have become compromised over time, it should be seen as unacceptable for new stations to be poorly located from the outset.
Analysis of stations opened in the 21st century indicates a worsening of the situation with over 87% of new stations falling into Classes 3 to 5. Worse still, of the 13 sites opened in the last 5 years, 8 fail to make Classes 1 or 2. Thus the proportion of “Junk” sites is actually increasing.
In 2022 the Neatishead Class 4 site was opened in the shadow of a large Radar ‘Dome. In 2023 the new Arthog site was equally opened as a Class 4 inaccurate unit.
This practise of opening new inadequately accurate reporting sites must be stopped immediately or alternatively do not use their data for any form of climate reporting purposes.
One instance of particular concern is the Hull, East Park station installed in 2011. It is a Class 5 site in a very poor position in the “Animal Education Centre”. It sits hard alongside what is now an overgrown hedge where tour bus vehicles park. It regularly records the regional daily high temperature on the Met Office Daily listings as well as the National highest temperature on 2 occasions so far this year. An example of this listing can be viewed here.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/observations/weather-extremes
As well as two reputable Private Weather Sites (PWS) in Hull in close proximity to the official Met Office site there is also the Hull University Research Centre’s very well sited, equipped and maintained weather station.
https://www.hull.ac.uk/research/institutes/eei/sudslab-uk
Both the PWS sites and the very high quality University site record significantly lower temperatures than the official site. In contrast to the unhelpful and evasive responses typical of my inquiries to the Met Office, the University were exceptionally helpful and even gave me direct personal access to their live online data. Closer inspection revealed the official Met Office site to be regularly recording up to 3 degrees celcius higher. Despite raising this issue with the Met Office they declined to answer my queries. When asked to supply their recent data from the site, I was referred to an archive site that operates 18 months in arrears to view it presumably some time in the distant future..
It is not an unreasonable inference, therefore, that the Met Office are deliberately seeking to inflate the climate temperature record by installing new sites likely to record artificially raised temperatures. This leads on to the related issue below.
Closure of Rural Sites.
Listen to many weather forecasts and it is commonplace to hear along the lines of “those temperatures represent towns and cities. It will be a few degrees colder out in the countryside” and even “and there may be a frost in some rural areas” etc.
These types of weather presenter’s remarks expressly do not mean there is some form of artificial cooling device reducing temperatures in rural areas. It means that urban temperatures are artificially elevated and are not representative of the natural climate.
This phenomenon is known as the “Urban Heat Island” effect. The slew over to disproportionately recording many more urban rather than rural sites is not just one of increased urban encroachment on the countryside. It has been primarily caused by closure of rural sites causing an unrepresentative imbalance.
Taking my home county of Kent as one example,
150 years ago in 1874 there were 12 official Met Office stations simultaneously operating.
By 100 years ago in 1924 the number had grown to 18.
By 50 years ago in 1974 there were 32 simultaneously operating official Met Office weather stations.
Now in Kent in 2024 there are just 7 . This situation has been replicated throughout the country as a whole.
The cause of this quite dramatic and relatively sudden reduction in measuring points was largely due to the automation of recording.
Historically temperatures were recorded using Liquid in Glass (LIG) thermometers – the type most of the general public are familiar with. These required human operators to visually read them and report data. A small army of volunteers and officials from various organisations fulfilled this function.
In order to automate readings necessitated changing thermometers to electrically operated Platinum Resistance Thermometers (PRTs), These required a reliable electricity supply and data communications (typically a landline) which were frequently not available at rural sites in the early days of automation from the 1980s onwards. Hence many rural sites were closed down.
‘
In Kent alone longstanding rural sites at Anvil Green, Charing, Dover/RMS Guston, Dungeness, Elmstone, Eynsford, Hadlow, Northdown, Peckham (Kent), St Margarets, Throwley, Tunstall, Ulcombe West Malling and Wye were all closed. Even some well sited parkland sites on the outskirts of towns were similarly shut down at Tunbridge Wells, Whitstable, Margate, Herne Bay and Swanley.
By eliminating cooler recording sites from the overall data record left predominantly urbanised sites to cause an unrepresentative temperature uplift from slewed averaging without any genuinely significant temperature increase actually taking place. Statistical sleight of hand (however inadvertent it may have been) produced inaccurate historic misrepresentation.
Use of Data
To demonstrate how Met Office data is used/misused with some quite bizarre conclusions, consider this report following the 2022 July hot weather event. An organisation known as World Weather Attribution “analysed” data produced from 3 UK weather station sites.
They concluded
“At three individual stations the 1-day maximum temperatures are as rare as 1 in 500 years in St James Park in London, about 1 in 1000 years in Durham and only expected on average once in 1500 years in today’s climate in Cranwell, Lincolnshire. “
St James Park London is a Class 5 (junk for climate reporting purposes) weather site i.e hugely worse than any of the Class 4 sites I have highlighted above. 500 years ago the population of London was just 50,000 and in the midst of the Medieval Warm Period.
Durham Observatory is also a Class 5 (junk for climate reporting purposes) weather site and similarly much worse than all those class 4 sites I highlighted above. It simply did not exist 1,000 years ago.
“Cranwell, Lincolnshire” is not some sleepy village rural location, it is actually sited at RAF Cranwell – an RAF training site housing numerous jet aircraft. The Met Office, somewhat implausibly, declares it a Class 1 site (though I suspect this is a default error) which is positioned close to the taxiway to the main runway and alongside what is believed to be a sewage settlement tank.
How many jet fighters were there in 522A.D.?
It would be staggeringly difficult for any reasonable person to accept that the vicinity of over 12,000 feet of tarmac runway plus associated taxiways, hangars, roadways and parking aprons is somehow representative of the natural environment. The same reasonable person would likely conclude such a site would give an artificially high and unnatural reading.
The red kite marks the point between the weather station and the sewage settlement tank just by the taxiway.
Conclusions
I have clearly demonstrated with hard evidence that:
The Met Office is regularly fabricating data.
It is not producing reliable nor accurate data for climate reporting purposes from a network of poorly sited and inadequately maintained locations..
It is not meeting internationally recognised standards which it was itself party to establishing.
It has, over time, contributed to historic selection of unrepresentative data produced.
It is operating in a secretive, covert way and to its own regulation without independent oversight.
It is failing to meet high standards of scientific integrity.
It marks its own homework.
I feel it warrants independent review to:
Establish a high quality series of sites solely designed for climate reporting purposes. These should be independently overseen to ensure continued integrity of data.
An independent working group should re-analyse historic data to re-compile a historic record from only high quality sites that have been identified as not being compromised by extraneous heat sources.
An open declaration of likely inaccuracy of existing published data to avoid other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching erroneous conclusions.
I await your views on this matter in your capacity of the Minister responsible for the Met Office.
Yours Sincerely
Ray Sanders “
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
October 31, 2024 at 04:36PM
