From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Temperatures are forecast to rise this weekend in parts of the UK and the Met Office will no doubt be out in force promoting its climate change scare stories. Existential threats may well be aired and Net Zero will be noted to be the only solution. Alas, as the sun shines down on the green and pleasant land (weather maps coloured dark purple for agitprop purposes) there are growing fears that the only existential threat on the horizon is to the Met Office itself.

The state meteorologist blows through about £300 million a year but it has faced devastating disclosures over the last 12 months that it runs a temperature measuring service full of junk data, invented readings and retrospectively adjusted numbers. It claims accuracy to one hundredth of a degree centigrade to weaponise its stats for the Net Zero fantasy, but operates a nationwide measuring network that is more suitable for limited agricultural purposes such as identifying when the seasons change. If it is just another political cheer leader for Net Zero but fails to run a robust recording network, then what’s the point of the Met Office?

This question was asked 10 years ago in a BBC programme narrated by Daily Mail journalist Quentin Letts. At the time, concern was rising about the unsubstantiated claims made by the Met Office linking individual weather events to alleged human-caused climate change. Labour MP Graham Stringer cast doubt on claims made about flooding in the UK in 2013-14, noting: “The Chief Scientific Officer [at the Met Office] said that this was undoubtedly due to climate change, but most of the scientists even in the Met Office looked askance at that, because there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever that rain was related to climate change.” Stringer was correct and his analysis is confirmed by later work issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Needless to say, confected outrage from the Green Blob ensured that the programme was taken down and it has not been seen or heard of since.

So what is the point of spending upwards of £300 million on an organisation devoted to promoting climate scaremongering – hardly a commodity in short supply these days – that is patently unable to properly do its day job of measuring ambient air temperature? Around 80% of its 380 temperature sites around the UK are deemed by the World Meteorological Organisation to have measuring class ‘uncertainties’ from 2°C-5°C, while long-term average ‘location’ temperature data rely on the invented input from over 100 non-existent stations.

Everyday the Met Office declares ‘extreme’ temperatures around the country. Earlier this week, a high of 18.5°C was recorded in Grampian at Dyce, or as it is often known, Aberdeen airport. The site of the Dyce measuring device is shown below by the red marker.

Every picture tells a story – a story of sites ravaged by unnatural heat, boosted by the recent introduction of electronic thermometers able to instantly pick up every corrupted temperature spike caused by extraneous factors. Thus we have the Met Office’s Chief Scientific Officer Professor Stephen Belcher claiming that between 2014-2023 the number of days recording 28°C in the UK had doubled, while those over 30°C had tripled compared to 1961-1990. Professor Belcher is keen to call on the government to “stabilise the climate” but in the immediate future he should perhaps be more concerned about stabilising his own shonky statistics.

The Met Office not only faces stiff competition in the climate Armageddon stakes but also in its bread-and-butter forecasting business. Its forecasting of weather is reasonable but it doesn’t seem to stand out from its many private competitors in this market; competitors, it might be noted, that are not a weighty burden on the British taxpayer. Earlier this year, Which magazine, in association with the University of Reading, published the results of a two-week survey of weather forecasts provided by five popular apps.

There has not been much work done to date on comparing the forecasts of the main services but the Weather Channel appears to be a consistently strong performer. The Which survey found it performed well when forecasting the weather in the next few hours and was also strong for weather predictions later in the day. BBC Weather was found to be “especially poor” at predicting the forecast later the same day, and overestimated the amount of rain due.

The UK Met Office is not under any political risk at the moment with a Labour Government still seemingly committed to Net Zero. Needless to say, this project needs all the climate fearmongering help it can get. But its fat budget would be tempting to slash for any DOGE-inspired government that might come to power in future. In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is facing heavy funding cuts to its climate-related programmes as the Trump Administration looks for a 27% cut in its overall budget. Like the Met Office, NOAA is a world leader in driving climate alarm, so many of the cuts will be easy to make. In particular, the reductions, which will need to be passed by Congress, target the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which could see its annual allowance for climate work cut from $485 million to $171 million.

The Met Office might be safe for the moment in its self-satisfied form, but for how much longer can it claim its unreformed nationwide air temperature network is fit for purpose? And how long will its climate alarm edifice last when Net Zero comes tumbling down, and serious politicians start look for easy cuts in bloated state operations?

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

By Robert Bradley Jr. — June 25, 2025

“It is ironic that Jason Grumet of the American Clean Power Association argues for continued taxpayer subsidies for wind power…. In 1986, a predecessor organization to ACPA, the American Wind Energy Association, testified, ‘The U.S. wind industry has … demonstrated reliability and performance levels that make them very competitive.’ False.” – Tom Pyle, IER (below)

Here they are–the crony capitalists who seek wealth from the political means (special government favor) rather than consumer demand in the market with taxpayers neutral.

The list comes from a recent letter from “clean” energy trade groups, led by Jason Grumet of the American Clean Power Association, to Senator John Thune and Representative Mike Crapo, urging them “to be thoughtful when phasing out clean energy tax credits.”

Advanced Energy United (AEU)
American Clean Power Association (ACP)
American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE)
American Public Power Association (APPA)
Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA)
Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA)
Edison Electric Institute (EEI)
Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA)
Fusion Industry Association (FIA)
Large Public Power Council (LPPC)
National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED)
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)
National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA)
National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA)
National Hydropower Association (NHA)
National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA)
Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI)
Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)

Of the above “dirty 18,” perhaps the worst is the Edison Electric Institute (EEI). Shame on them. Their position change 16 years ago resulted from one person, the father of electricity cronyism (rent-seeking), James E. “Jim” Rogers (1947–2018). Rogers proudly stated:

I was the first CEO in the electric utility industry to speak about the changes needed in the face of climate change. I’ve long advocated [government energy subsidies] to grow the economy and transition to a low-carbon future…. I was chairman of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) when it changed its position to support federal climate legislation in 2009.

Enron-ex Rogers, in fact, brought Enron/Ken Lay’s crony capitalism model to electricity. Boo. As I wrote six years ago:

Yes, Rogers was making a deal with the devil, but he could claim to be playing defense. But he was hurting the entire fossil fuel industry by playing the political game to start a civil war in the power industry. The Baptists needed this Bootlegger.

Appendix: Grumet vs. Pyle on IRA Subsidies

Jason Grumet of the American Clean Power Association previously earlier this year made his case in a letter in the Wall Street Journal, “Don’t Take the Wind Out of America’s Sails” (January 21, 2025):

Your editorial “Trump Speaks Truth to Wind Power” (Jan. 13) is at odds with the longstanding national imperative to increase domestic energy production. For more than a century, Congress has employed tax policy to encourage all forms of domestic energy production, from hydropower, coal and oil to nuclear energy, natural gas and, most recently, renewable resources.

These incentives take a variety of forms, including subsidized access to federal lands, tax credits for energy production and domestic manufacturing and liability caps in the case of accidents. In a theoretical world governed by macroeconomists, we should all welcome the discussion of an energy system that is free of government subsidies. In the real world, careening energy demand requires that we encourage all forms of American-made power. In addition to reducing costs for consumers and powering America’s digital dominance, the energy sector is an engine for economic growth and employment.

Like oil and gas, the domestic wind industry supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction and manufacturing. It also provides investments to local communities through landowner payments and local tax revenues. According to a recent analysis, the incentives criticized in the editorial are returning nearly $3 of economic activity for every dollar of taxpayer investment. President Trump’s call for increasing American energy dominance is the right direction for the country. Retreating to a “some of the above,” strategy that pits the federal government against any aspect of the American energy industry is bad politics and bad policy.

– JASON GRUMET CEO, American Clean Power Association Washington

To which IER president Thomas Pyle responded (not published in the WSJ):

It is ironic that Jason Grumet of the American Clean Power Association argues for continued taxpayer subsidies for wind power. In 1986, a predecessor organization to ACPA, the American Wind Energy Association, testified, “The U.S. wind industry has … demonstrated reliability and performance levels that make them very competitive.” False. Fourteen extensions of the “temporary” Production Tax Credit since 1992 reaffirm the inherent problems of an electricity generation alternative that is dilute, intermittent, and full of unique ecological drawbacks.

Charles Rotter

In its steady promotion of fiscal frugality, the Trump administration has sent the entire content production staff of Climate.gov packing as their NOAA contract expired on May 31—effectively silencing the federal government’s flagship climate propaganda platform overnight. Rebecca Lindsey, Tom Di Liberto and the rest of the once–highly paid spin doctors who churned out daily “urgent” updates on melting ice sheets and CO₂ curves received form letters informing them that their “knowledge, skills, and abilities are no longer of use to NOAA,” a fitting epitaph for a site built on relentless hype.

For years, millions of casual web surfers landed on Climate.gov only to be lectured by animated carbon-cycle maps, sliding-scale temperature-anomaly widgets and color-coded doom gauges predicting imminent coastal calamity. All of that eye-candy is now frozen in digital amber—archived but never to be updated—so that future historians can gawp at government-sponsored hysteria in its unedited glory. No more breathless countdowns to climate Armageddon, no more click-bait pop-ups proclaiming every thunderstorm as “proof” of runaway warming. The propagandists have packed up their graph-generating scripts and left, leaving behind only static pages that serve as curious relics of alarmist marketing.

Critics have wailed about “critical climate data” being scrubbed, but their caterwauling stems from a basic misunderstanding: none of the raw measurements ever disappeared. The station records, satellite feeds, radar logs, ocean-buoy readings and even paleoclimate ice-core datasets remain untouched in the National Centers for Environmental Information archive, which manages over 60 petabytes of environmental data and continues to serve it up via Climate Data Online APIs, FTP servers and the NCEI Map Viewer. In other words, the data weren’t scrubbed—they were never meant to be buried; only the politically curated presentation was.

Let the narrative merchants keep insisting that “without Climate.gov the public will be left in the dark.” All that’s dark now is their empty echo chamber. Researchers already download the identical datasets through legacy servers and modern APIs, free from grant-dependent graphics and grant-writing obligations. The Trump administration didn’t “destroy climate data”—it defunded a taxpayer-subsidized panic-porn production line. And if that leaves the fear-mongers shrieking into the void, that’s just proof their only real product was panic.

This isn’t mere belt-tightening; it’s the death rattle of a climate industrial complex enmeshed in grant cycles, media conferences and self-congratulatory symposia. First came the mid-winter purge of greenhouse-gas inventory portals and adaptation-strategy playbooks, then the layoff of hundreds of modelers and communicators—including the entire team behind the National Climate Assessment. Now, the pièce de résistance: the mothballing of the flagship propaganda website itself.

What happens next is deliciously ironic. Journalists will scramble to cite “independent experts” instead of regurgitating White House press releases. Schoolchildren Googling “Climate.gov” will find nothing but stale content from before June 2025. Policymakers who once leaned on slick NOAA pop-ups to justify mandates on electric cars and green subsidies will have to defend their proposals on substance rather than spun narratives. The very architects of alarm will discover that once you cut off the megaphone, the tornado of fear winds down.

Those who moan about a “slippery slope of censorship” conveniently ignore that Climate.gov was never a neutral repository; it functioned as a de facto propaganda arm for unverified worst-case projections. Now that the faucet of federal hype has been shut off, civic discourse can finally shift back toward sober cost-benefit analysis and genuine uncertainty. Markets and local communities—far more responsive to observable risks than to speculative model output—will decide how best to adapt, unfettered by taxpayer-funded hype.

So raise a glass to the shuttering of Climate.gov. This isn’t just a budget cut but the vanquishing of one of the most lavishly promoted panic-mongering platforms in government history. For every ominous anomaly graph they spun, all that remains now is silence—and silence is the most honest response to alarmism that could never hold up under real scrutiny.

By Andy May

In post 1, I ranked fourteen climate oscillations in Table 1 by their regression statistics against the HadCRUT5 global surface mean temperature. In this regression study the AMO is number one, the Western Hemisphere Warm Pool Area is #2, and the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area is #3. The fourth in importance is the Length of Day or “LOD.” Longer periods (>10 years) of acceleration in Earth’s rotation speed (shorter LOD) correspond to years of increasing zonal (east-west) circulation and global warming, whereas periods of deceleration (longer LOD) indicate less zonal acceleration and periods of cooling (Lambeck & Cazenave, 1976).

Currently, the variations in the length of day (LOD) are determined by the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) as the current length of day minus 86,400 seconds (i.e. 24 hours). This difference is very close to zero on 1 January 1958. Annual changes in LOD are almost entirely due to seasonal changes in zonal circulation with tidal, oceanographic, and hydrological phenomena contributing less than 10% to the changes (Lambeck & Hopgood, 1981). At longer timeframes, tides and core-mantle interactions may play a large role in LOD variations. While there is an identifiable tidal influence on LOD, the core-mantle interactions and magnetic field fluctuation effects on LOD are speculative and subjects of debate (Lambeck & Cazenave, 1976).

The LOD since 1650 is shown in figure 1 in milliseconds, this value is often abbreviated as “LOD,” but is technically ΔLOD. The values plotted in figure 1 are uncorrected for changes in tides and possible mantle-core or geomagnetic influences but still correlate to major long-term climatic changes as shown in the plot. The depth of the Little Ice Age temperature minimum in the late 1600s is easily seen, as well as the late 19^th century cooling, the early 20^th century warming, the mid-20^th century cooling, and the late 20^th century warming.

The fact that the rotation speed of Earth changes with time was discovered by Simon Newcomb (Newcomb, 1882, p. 465) in 1882. He carefully measured the transits of Mercury across the face of the Sun, the Moon around the Earth, and the orbit of the largest satellite of Jupiter and observed that they were all slightly off by the same amount of time. From this he concluded that the rotation speed of the Earth must be changing.

Two very important researchers, Klyashtorin and Lyubushin of the Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries (Klyashtorin & Lyubushin, 2007), have studied the relationship between the Atmospheric Circulation Index (ACI) and climate changes. The ACI characterizes periods of the relative predominance of zonal (east-west) circulation versus periods of predominantly north-south (meridional) circulation. It is this fundamental climate phenomenon that LOD measures indirectly.

Figure 2 is from Klyashtorin and Lyubushin (page 12, figure 1.4). The thin line is the meridional wind anomaly and the thick line is the zonal wind anomaly. Periods when the zonal line is very positive are warm in the Northern Hemisphere and periods when the meridional line are very positive are cooler. Compare figures 1 and 2, notice the correspondence.

When the polar jet stream is “wavier” (Chalif, Osterberg, & Partridge, 2025) meridional circulation is stronger and cold Arctic air more easily travels to the middle latitudes. When the jet stream is smoother and tighter around the pole, zonal circulation is stronger, and the middle latitudes and the globe are warmer. The two jet stream configurations are illustrated by Thomas Keel in figure 3.

Two thirds of the 20^th century cool period from the 1950s through the 1970s can be attributed to elevated jet stream waviness as shown in orange in figure 3 (Chalif, Osterberg, & Partridge, 2025). Modest waviness occurred between 2000 and 2010, associated with some cooling, but the most severe waviness periods in the 20^th century were 1900-1910, the 1940s, 1960s and the late 1970s to the early 1980s (Chalif, Osterberg, & Partridge, 2025). These periods are also visible, with roughly a 12-year lag in the LOD curve as shown in figure 4.

While the relationship in figure 4 is not perfect, there is some correspondence between HadCRUT5 and LOD after accounting for a 12-year lag. Lambeck and Cazenave call it a 10-15-year lag (Lambeck & Cazenave, 1976). They used this lag to predict that the cool period in the 1970s would end 10-15 years after the downward trend began in 1972 and warming would resume, which it did. I should note that the regression in post 1 did not incorporate the 12-year lag and when the lag is included the statistics do not improve significantly and the AMO, WHWP, and SAM (next post) still rank above LOD in the 1950 regression (see table 2, post 1). I take this to mean that LOD doesn’t add much to what is already in the top three oscillations.

As Lambeck & Cazenave explain, some have argued that atmospheric circulation changes are not strong enough to cause the observed changes in LOD, but they have calculated that latitudinal shifts of 10° between zones of maximum and minimum winds are sufficient to explain the changes. Clearly, atmospheric changes do not account for all the changes in LOD, but they can, and probably are, a very significant component.

Discussion

Clearly periods when meridional circulation (see the orange line in figure 3) dominate and the polar jet stream is very wavy, the Northern Hemisphere is cooler because more cold Arctic air spills into the middle latitudes, especially in the winter months. The global average surface temperature tends to follow the Northern Hemisphere because temperatures in the other regions of the planet don’t change much, at least over the past 12,000 years, as shown in figure 5.

The extreme waviness of the northern polar jet stream at times is partially due to the presence of most of the world’s land in the Northern Hemisphere and the fact that much of it is close to the Arctic Ocean. As we will see in the next post on the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), also called the Antarctic Oscillation, the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica acts very differently. The circumpolar winds in the Southern Hemisphere are more orderly and are better at confining the cold Antarctic air.

Works Cited

Chalif, J. I., Osterberg, E. C., & Partridge, T. F. (2025). A Wavier Polar Jet Stream Contributed to the Mid-20th Century Winter Warming Hole in the United States. AGU Advances, 6(3). doi:10.1029/2024AV001399

Keel, T. (2018). Examining the link between changes in the mid-latitude jet stream in the northern hemisphere and a recent amplification of surface temperatures in the Arctic. University College London. Retrieved from https://ift.tt/i2GqHEW

Klyashtorin, L. B., & Lyubushin, A. A. (2007). Cyclic Climate Changes and Fish Productivity. Moscow.

Lambeck, K., & Cazenave, A. (1976). Long Term Variations in the length of Day and Climate Change. Geophysical Journal International, 46(3), 555-573. doi:10.1111/j.1365-246X.1976.tb01248.x

Lambeck, K., & Hopgood, P. (1981). The Earth’s rotation and atmospheric circulation from 1963 to 1973. Geophysical Journal International, 64(1), 67-89. doi:10.1111/j.1365-246X.1981.tb02659.x

McCarthy, D. D., & Babcock, A. K. (1986). The length of day since 1656. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, 44(3), 281-292. doi:10.1016/0031-9201(86)90077-4

Newcomb, S. (1882). Transits of Mercury. In S. Newcomb, Astronomical Papers – American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac (Vol. 1, p. 465). Washington: U.S. Navy.

Stephenson, F. R., & Morrison, L. V. (1984). Long-term changes in the rotation of the Earth : 700 B.C. to A.D. 1980. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 313(1524), 47-70. doi:10.1098/rsta.1984.0082