54.86294 -5.07543 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 (WRONG) Installed 1/4/2105

When Tim Channon originated the Surface Stations Project in 2012 he initially reviewed the “Synoptic” stations before moving onto a few of the other “Climate” reporting stations. Whilst the former are sophisticated sites with a wide suite of instrumentation the latter are much more basic units reporting primarily just temperatures, pressure,humidity and precipitation. In reviewing Cavendish he made a very salient point regarding these that I feel is important to repeat:

“Note please: this site will be owned and operated by a private individual, a volunteer who has done this year in and year out, within the land space that he has. Keep any criticism for the Met Office and professionals who fail to make the nature of sites they use very clear!”

The Met Office sanctions many “amateur” sites for climate reporting purposes and it is they who should be taken to task for the use of totally unacceptable sites to contribute to the national historic temperature record. My criticisms are thus aimed at the Met Office not the site owners and operators.

This Portpatrick site was installed in 2015 therefore after WMO CIMO classifications were fully understood and operational. For my part I find it very strange why manually recording stations like this Craigenlee Croft site are still being introduced when automation makes the whole data collection system much simpler. Data availability by the minute, as demonstrated in my (not Tim’s) review of Cavendish, has much greater forecasting benefit – even if the 5th decimal part of a degree reading is quite risible. This faux accuracy point rather makes siting detail important – at the falsely claimed accuracy level the tiniest waft of, in reality undetectable, warm air would be registered. So here is the Streetview image of the owner’s home, extensive gravel driveway, and unenclosed Stevenson Screen.

I personally would like to discuss with the Met Office site inspector who classified this as Class 4 simply to enlighten them of what the CIMO regulations actually state – they clearly have not read them.

To go through the details for uniformity of approach, below are the 3 and 10 metres radius circled areas.

is it just me or is it difficult to understand how the gravel driveway and parked cars within exclusion zones are not noticeable? It is easy to envisage a regular occurrence of a car reverse parked with its exhaust pipe under 10 feet from the unenclosed screen – hot day, run the engine for a while to run the air-con, cold day run the engine to defrost the wind screen. Do not forget that Met Office staff were willing to put in writing that their PRTs register to the 5th decimal place. As a former Met Office manager put it ” A perfect example of this was the Met Office site where temperatures were recorded to 4 or 5 decimal places, giving the readings the sense of extreme accuracy, whereas they just showed the stupidity of the observer. “

The nearby house wall to the north with the trees to the south west will all cause various shading effects. The street view image shows the vegetation around the screen well above regulation heights . Being unenclosed in a domestic rear garden means that any normal life activities can intervene. This site is probably worse than the absurdly compromised Derrylin site. Barbecue, garden rubbish fire, hanging laundry out to dry anything and everything goes………….So you think this is not a good site maybe?

This is Portpatrick:Southcliff which ran from 1/7/2000 to 31/11/2014 and was probably the same amateur meteorologist’s home who simply moved house and the weather station went with them – actually a common experience as I will highlight in future reviews. Yes really Met office weather stations move when their owners move house.

How did the former site rank on CIMO regulations? Judge for yourself from this 2009 image.

I find it indisputable that both sites were/are class 5 Junk by WMO standards. Why does the Met office use such low grade inaccurate and unreliable sites? Consider this from their “Location Specific, Long Term Climate Averages”

The Met Office claims to use data from “well correlated” and “nearby” stations to form “climate averages” for closed stations but then fails to record which sites they actually used – or rather it refuses to divulge the information on the grounds it is not recorded. Or is it the case that they do not want the public to “infer” that the climate averages for Lough Cowey, County Down, Northern Ireland (closed 2008) might have its ongoing figures derived from various back gardens in Dumfries and Galloway?

So finally here is my open challenge to the Met Office – FACT: You are using readings from a back garden in Scotland to fabricate data for a closed site in Northern Ireland. Prove me wrong.

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May 11, 2025 at 07:38AM

By Paul Homewood

 

h/t Ian Cunningham/ Philip Bratby/ Ian Magness

 

As we know, Orsted cancelled their massive Hornsea 4 offshore wind farm the other day. This has left Mad Miliband’s 2030 Clean Power policy in tatters.

Hornsea 4 would have been the UK’s biggest wind farm, with its 2400 MW of capacity. Its withdrawal  from last year’s Allocation Round 6 (AR6) leaves just the East Anglia Two scheme with 963 MW from that auction. There were no contracts awarded at all to offshore wind in AR5 the previous year.

Remember as well that Vattenfall cancelled their huge Boreas wind farm two years ago for the same reason as Orsted.

We have about 15 GW of offshore wind capacity operational, plus another 10 GW in the pipeline, which already have CfDs. This latter includes 1080 MW from Hornsea 3, which Orsted switched from AR4 to AR6, piggy-backing on Hornsea 4 in order to procure a higher price. I cannot see how this can still retain its CfD, given that the main project has been cancelled. (I have asked the LCCC to clarify).

Labour is targeting 50 GW by 2030, which is plainly unattainable, given the project timescales involved. Nevertheless, Miliband is determined to get as much offshore wind contracted as possible in AR7 and AR8, before Labour are booted out of power.

To do that, he is going to have to offer much higher strike prices. Remember that Orsted are taking a half billion hit for pulling out of Hornsea 4, so their strike price, currently £85/MWh, is plainly far too low to make any money.

Also bear in mind that no other projects other than East Anglia Two bid as low as Orsted. My guess is that the new prices will come in around £100/MWh. As the top bid is paid to all successful bidders, strike prices will inevitable rise higher.

This presents Miliband with another problem, because the current system has a budget pot of subsidy money for each Allocation Round. The higher the prices offered, the less capacity he gets.

Which is why he is now considering changing the system to a capacity budget, not a subsidy budget. the Telegraph report:

Ed Miliband is plotting a surge in the wind farm subsidies added to electricity bills to prop up his ailing green power target.

The Energy Secretary is preparing to ditch key limits on the cash diverted from bills to turbine developers, The Telegraph can reveal.

The manoeuvre, uncovered in official documents, is expected to allow Mr Miliband to bankroll thousands of extra turbines in the next few years.

To accelerate wind farm construction, Mr Miliband wants to scrap limits on the total subsidy on offer to offshore developers in Whitehall auctions.

Instead a target would be set for the amount of electricity to be generated, with the cost to households only worked out afterwards.

Read the full story here.

Such a move would destroy once and for all claims that renewable energy is cheaper than gas. As the Telegraph report, even DESNZ are now dropping the pretence that bills will come down, (at least not until some unidentified time in the distant future!)

A Whitehall insider agreed costs could rise initially, suggesting that the investment in renewables now would bring prices down in years to come.

“It means short-term pain in energy bills, for long-term gain,” he said.

But more importantly it would be political suicide for Labour, as it would be very easy to calculate how much extra their obsession with renewables will cost the public.

Miliband needs an extra 25 GW of offshore wind. An increase in price from £85 to £100/MWh for this would add £1.5 billion a year to bills.

But much more damning would be the cumulative cost over the 15 year contract period, a total of £22.5 billion.

Could Miliband survive the charge that he had handed a £22 billion bung to his renewable chums?

John Constable’s comment in the Telegraph says it all:

“With a small tweak to the green subsidy rules Ed Miliband can give himself the freedom to quietly and quickly add many billions of pounds a year to national electricity bills.

“If the Chancellor were to propose tax increases of this scale affecting every household and business in the country there would be a storm of criticism in Parliament and elsewhere.

“How much longer will the Prime Minister allow the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero to operate without democratic accountability?”

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May 11, 2025 at 05:41AM

The paper by Grant et al ticks the full Marxist Bingo Card whipping up class warfare driven by “intergenerational inequality”. It was funded by the EU and is being used to justify the huge cost and deprivation that is being forced on EU citizens. They claim that babies today will live through more ghastly heatwaves than their grandparents born in 1960 did. And it’s all “unprecedented” (they use the term 25 times in the paper).  It’s as if the Holocene did not exist. Sea levels were at least a metre higher 8,000 years ago. How could the world not have been hotter? And how did those cats, dogs, geese and frogs live in the high arctic north of Norway 9,000 years ago. There were thousands of bones in those caves. Do they or do they not exist?

 Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense… « JoNova

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May 11, 2025 at 05:18AM

The French are finding out that combining nuclear power with unstable wind and sun is not a good idea and is a risk to the power grid.
Spain recently had to learn a similar lesson in a most painful manner.

Symbol image generated by Grok AI. 

In a recent EDF report on  nuclear safety, Rapport de l’Inspecteur Général pour la Sûreté Nucléaire et la Radioprotection, lead author and former admiral Jean Casabianca concluded that a further expansion of wind and solar energy in France poses serious risk to the country’s power grid.

According to the report, the instability of a weather-dependent wind and solar power supply is a technical and financial burden to nuclear power in France.

Page 13 of the report states:

The massive arrival of new renewable electricity sources (RE), both intermittent and a priority on the grid, has multiplied load variations.

They are not without risk to the safety of the power system (including blackouts), nor are they without constraints on the operation of our facilities. In the long term, they call into question our economic model. (…)

Modulation has gone from flexibility to constraint, with nuclear power having to meet demand alone or in conjunction with hydropower, unless we resort to using thermal and carbon-intensive means.

In addition, load following inevitably has an impact on the machine, which is more frequently solicited by deep cycling. The increase in fortuitous events is not obvious, but it’s over time that the effects will be appreciated.

I believe that the priority given to renewable energies, in a unilateral nuclear-Renewable Energies scheme, leads to power variations which it would be all the more opportune to dispense with, as they are never insignificant in terms of safety, particularly reactivity control, and the maintainability, longevity and operating costs of our facilities.”

Many previously claimed that the nuclear industry could be harmoniously paired with wind energy and thus lead to a decarbonized French electricity mix. But that is proving to be more fantasy than reality. The recent Spanish blackout was a glaring example of what can happen when ideology clashes with hard science and reality.

Many engineers and specialists had warned of the risks and complications involved with nuclear power plants having to adapt their output to uncontrolled, fluctuating energies like wind and sun.

AASSDN site here summarizes:

In the global energy war being waged in France by this pro-wind and pro-photovoltaic lobbying that is contrary to France’s energy interests, this discreet report strikes a real blow to France’s intermittent energy policy. Even if energy and political players haven’t yet fully grasped the significance of this historic technical report, there’s no denying that it will be a landmark and cannot be buried or downplayed by EDF CEO Luc Rémont.”

Hat-tip: Blackout News.

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May 11, 2025 at 05:15AM