Daily News 26 Jun 2025

Liscombe WMO03710 – An introduction to McDonalds syndrome – I’m not “lovin it.”

51.08682 -3.60907 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1993

Liscombe is one of only two weather stations within the Exmoor National Park in Somerset. The other is the manual site at much abused and only intermittently read Nettlecombe. Liscombe is a fully and expensively equipped World Meteorological Organisation reporting site that is very far from any urbanisation effects. It should be a good location to represent the nearly 700 square kilometres of the National Park, but unfortunately it is a poor “Class 4 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 2 °C)” Is this by accident or design? Introducing a possible problem – “Mcdonalds syndrome”

I have come across numerous exampIes of such highly equipped sites that have been allowed, through what I suspected was neglect, to fall from what originally must have been good quality locations to rather poor ones that the Met Office itself has to downgrade to Class 4 levels of inaccuracy. Prime examples are Shobdon and Glasgow Bishopton but there are very many others. Further studies of so many of these prime sites has made me wonder if it is just a case of neglect of are there other motives.

One issue that always perplexes me is why so many official sites are alongside fences and walls when these are obviously known problems. Why does nobody at the Met Office insist on overgrowth around sites being kept in check – the situation at Poolewe reached absurd proportions when the option to move it into a walled garden was preferable to simply managing the vegetation. Why was Culzean Castle station relocated only for young saplings to be simultaneously planted alongside it?

Liscombe weather station is very remote and there is no street view option available. Looking at the aerial image in isolation it actually appears to have been established with its own “walled garden” effect set in the centre of a square of trees. Then I found a close up image.

Taking both all the available aerial images over time and this close up lead me to one conclusion – this is not neglect, it is deliberate. This 2001 image below indicates the enclosure hedging was planted on the original installation of the site. It is no wonder the wind mast is so tall to catch the wind, those surrounding trees to all compass points are progressively dwarfing the screen whose base starts at 1.2 metres from the ground.

The Met office has literally hundreds of acronyms they use regularly for all manner of adjustments as can be seen from this site’s CEDA archive, such as “CARLOS”, “WADRAIN” and “MODELRAD” . The meaning of a new one suddenly dawned on me –

Micro-Climate Distortion Of Natural And Local Data-Sets…………….a.k.a McDonalds.

It is a long term process of setting up a weather station together with the means to progressively convert an open site into an artificially warmer micro climate, filter out winds, enhance Aitken Effect and retain collected daytime warmth overnight. This tactic gets over all the major problems of open rural sites stubbornly refusing to play ball and record runaway warming. If anyone has a better explanation of why this taxpayer funded Government agency has quite deliberately “walled in” so many of not just its lower rated sites but even its top equipped synoptic ones as well, I would be responsive to hearing it. For my part this is not some jokey conspiracy article, I am genuinely starting to detect motivation behind so many sites being reduced to known lower graded CIMO Classes. This is in addition to so many new sites starting their life being lowly rated – it is not just small manual sites such as Whitesands starting as Class 4 (more realistically Class 5) but even new automated sites in government owned facilities such as Neatishead at Class 4S (effectively Class 5).

This sort of irresponsible asset management has to be stopped or the Met Office stands open to an undeniable accusation of deliberately seeking to corrupt the historic temperature record – I’m not lovin it.

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June 26, 2025 at 02:09PM

Daily News 26 Jun 2025

“BP Energy Review” – 2024

By Paul Homewood

This year’s “BP Energy Review” is now out, and to say it is a disappointment to the greenies is an understatement.

I’ll do a full analysis tomorrow, but here are the bullet points:

https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review/resources-and-data-downloads

Emissions of CO2 are up by 1.2% in 2024 from the year before
Total energy supply rose by 2.1%
Fossil fuel use rose by 1.5%, with share dropping slightly from 87.0% to 86.6%
Wind and solar power share barely rose at all – from 2.5% to 2.8%
In absolute terms, wind and solar increased by 2.36 Ej, while fossil fuels went up by 7.60 Ej

With each year that goes by, it becomes ever clearer that the world as a whole is not interested in Net Zero.

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June 26, 2025 at 12:13PM

Daily News 26 Jun 2025

Climate Propaganda Breakthrough? “… binary data creates an illusion of sudden shifts …”

Essay by Eric Worrall

Inducing a motivational sense of acute loss in the general public might just be a matter of messaging.

Why climate change fades into the background – and how to change that

The public is tuning out the seemingly slow warming of the world, but it doesn’t have to be that way, argue Grace Liu and Rachit Dubey

By Rachit Dubey and Grace Liu

For a long time, many climate scientists and advocates held onto an optimistic belief: when the impacts of global warming became undeniable, people and governments would finally act decisively. Perhaps a devastating hurricane, heatwave or flood – or even a cascade of disasters – would make the severity of the problem impossible to ignore, spurring large-scale action. Yet, even as disasters mount, climate change remains low on voters’ priority lists and policy responses are tepid.

…

That led us to ask: could binary climate data – yes-or-no indicators such as “lake froze” vs “no freeze” – make people sit up and take notice better than graphs showing gradual temperature rise?

We tested this idea in a series of experiments. Participants were shown one of two graphs: one displayed a fictional town’s rising winter temperatures; the other showed whether its lake froze each year. Importantly, both graphs captured the same underlying climate trend. But people’s responses were very different.

…

Why? We found that binary data creates an illusion of sudden shifts. When people saw a series of winters when the lake froze, followed by years when it didn’t, they perceived a clear “before” and “after”, even though the change was gradual.

…

Grace Liu is at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and Rachit Dubey is at UCLA

The abstract of the study;

Article
Published: 17 April 2025

Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change

Grace Liu, Jake C. Snell, Thomas L. Griffiths & Rachit Dubey

Nature Human Behaviour (2025)

Abstract

For much of the global population, climate change appears as a slow, gradual shift in daily weather. This leads many to perceive its impacts as minor and results in apathy (the ‘boiling frog’ effect). How can we convey the urgency of the crisis when its impacts appear so subtle? Here, through a series of large-scale cognitive experiments (N = 799), we find that presenting people with binary climate data (for example, lake freeze history) significantly increases the perceived impact of climate change (Cohen’s d = 0.40, 95% confidence interval 0.26–0.54) compared with continuous data (for example, mean temperature). Computational modelling and follow-up experiments (N = 398) suggest that binary data enhance perceived impact by creating an ‘illusion’ of sudden shifts. Crucially, our approach does not involve selective data presentation but rather compares different datasets that reflect equivalent trends in climate change over time. These findings, robustly replicated across multiple experiments, provide a cognitive basis for the ‘boiling frog’ effect and offer a psychologically grounded approach for policymakers and educators to improve climate change communication while maintaining scientific accuracy.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02183-9

The scientists behind this research seem to be struggling with their own audience issues. They were pushing the same argument back in April;

From the full article, the fictional town example was apparently inspired by changes in freezing over of Lake Carnegie near Princeton, New Jersey. Apparently the lake doesn’t freeze over much anymore. But between 1900 to now, New Jersey’s population rose from just over two million people to 9.5 million people. A rise of 7.5 million people is a lot of additional pollution, industry and home heating, all of which could have contributed to slightly warmer winters and darkening of lake ice.

There is an additional problem, the binary approach might not have the broad appeal the scientists are hoping to achieve.

Binary thinking is how you create fanatics, some people are drawn to simple answers, even when those answers are a less than complete picture of what is happening. But arguably most people whose minds are befuddled by simple answers are already climate activists, there has been more than enough emotive climate propaganda over the years to reach people who have impaired critical thinking skills.

Perhaps the scientists need to test their theory by applying their own binary propaganda breakthrough to how they promote their theory – “either you listen to us, or the public loses interest in climate change.”. Though I suspect after years of embarrassing missed predictions, nothing anyone does in the foreseeable future can save the climate movement from the weight of its baggage of failure.