57.59273 -3.82238 No Met Office CIMO Assessement. Installed 1/9/1998 closed 31/12/2014
The CEDA location archive indicates there has been an official weather station in Nairn since 1873, however, there has definitely been an official weather station predating that evidenced by daily weather reports including a Nairn “station” long before then. The issue with the Druim Farm site is that, despite Met Office claims, it was very short lived, despite their providing long term data, despite an unacceptably infrequent observation record and despite the simple fact it closed almost eleven years ago, it refuses to die.
The theme of Met office providing data for non existing sites will not go away. For my part in trying to identify good quality, long term sites suitable for recreating an accurate historic temperature record, I have to investigate all possible options. I feel I will ultimately have to prove the data validity of the chosen sites in order to avoid accusations of “cherry picking”. Amazingly, the Met office does not seem to feel constrained by the burden of such proof and appears comfortable with quoting such sites as Nairn:Druim that only ever existed for 16 years – the rest is their usual smoke and mirrors.
As with Newton Rigg, Nairn:Druim is shown as an “OPEN” “Historic” station with a data record stretching back to 1931 only it is neither “OPEN” nor does it have a long record – and details matter to any science.
I will reiterate the point that I consider this portrayal as misrepresentation. If any private company hid relevant details in the small print in the manner the Met Office does it would not be considered acceptable. The impression given is a continuous record from 1931 from one site that is completely false and the only clarification comes from the small print.
What this header fails to communicate is that the relocation distance was so large that the site was both renamed and renumbered to identify two distinctly different climatologies. The original site is indicated below.
The 4.2 Km/ 2.6 miles difference also included a 15 metre/50 feet elevation change and from the beach side Nairn Golf Club to an inland farm site. Bonding together different datasets is not legitimate practise and as demonstrated at Manston even a small difference can have significant effects.
Whilst data shown for Nairn:Druim continues up to present the site actually closed 31/12/2014 over a decade ago meaning it only ever operated at its farm site for less than 16 years and yet the suggestion is of 85 years contiuous reporting – clearly false. Howeve it should also be noted that even when operational the site was typical of 21st century lapse observations standards that the Met Office seems happy to “work around” by adding in estimated numbers.
In its last operating year of 2014 there were 347 days readings taken – a relatively good year. 2013 saw just 210, 2012 just 281, 2011 just 340, 2010 just 327, 2009 just 320. The overall observations record was so typically very poor it hardly seems surprising the site was closed, so quite why the pretence of the site being open is continued with is a complete mystery. Perhaps such sites offer the ability to manipulate numbers – the “estimated” numbers for this site will, after all, be used to compile the homgenised numbers for other sites such as Aviemore a mere 26 miles away and 225 metres higher elevation.
In summary Nairn hosts another ghost station which only ever existed for a short period but continues to report fiction. The Met Office is not a trustworthy information source.
Guest essay by Jennifer Marohasy (reposted from her website by request) with addendum by Anthony.
Picture this: it’s a hot day, and you grab a soda can that’s been in the sun. You crack it open—psssht—and CO₂ fizzes out, tickling your nose, maybe spraying your shirt if you’re slow. It’s a tiny chaos, a burst you can’t control. Now imagine that fizz across the ocean’s sun-warmed surface, covering 71% of Earth, bubbling CO₂ into the air we breathe. Wild, right? A bit mad. I reckon it’s a missing piece of the climate puzzle.
The IPCC pins it all on smokestacks—11 billion tonnes of carbon a year from fossil fuels. Even skeptics like the CO₂ Coalition echo this, leaning on guys like Ferdinand Engelbeen who do their maths by the consensus numbers on this issue of CO₂ origins.
But they might have it all back to front and be leaving out ocean chemistry and biology. In fact, I’m convinced they are.
The Keeling Curve—CO₂’s climb from 280 to 420 ppm—carries their blame. But what if the ocean’s fizzing more than they think? Their rock-solid evidence could be mostly myth.
I’ve been digging into this with Ivan Kennedy, my second guest for the webinar series ‘Towards a New Theory of Climate Resilience’. That was back in February and I’m still to process the audio from this discussion.
Instead, my focus has been on writing technical papers. Ivan and I are working through a hypothesis that could perhaps flip the climate script.
Engelbeen claims fossil fuels’ isotopic fingerprint—light ¹²C (isotope C12) dragging the air’s ¹³C-to-¹²C ratio from -6.5‰ (per mille)* to -8.5‰ since 1850—is proof of coal and oil’s guilt. Ocean CO₂, averaging 0‰ from deep waters, should nudge it up—not down. Case closed.
Except. That ¹²C/¹³C tale’s shakier than they admit. What if the ocean’s surface, warmed by the sun, fizzes CO₂ richer in ¹²C than the deep oceans 0‰?
Calcification—limestone forming in seawater—might churn out CO₂ at -10‰ or lower, diluting that delta 13 signal just like fossil fuels. It’s not the deep ocean I’m on about—it’s the top 65 meters, the mixed layer, where sunlight and warmth cause biological action. So much action that it has built the biosphere’s great carbonate deposits, even the White Cliffs of Dover.
Ivan and I talked some of this over—Great Barrier Reef, North Pacific—during our webinar (soon my first podcast—thanks for waiting!). Calcification’s no sleepy trick; it’s a biological buzzsaw—corals, algae, phytoplankton like coccolithophores churning limestone. In summer blooms, they might pump out tonnes of CO₂, light on ¹³C. Our Thermal Acid Calcification (TAC) hypothesis says nature’s pitching in more than you might think.
Ponder this next time you sip a soda: could the ocean be bubbling up a CO₂ twist?
TAC’s perhaps a second plank in my New Theory of Climate Resilience. Subscribe for irregular updates, and to know about next webinars.
In churn and current, me with that silver scuba air tank at the surface above the mixing layer at the Great Barrier Reef. And the top/feature image is of my scuba buddies diving off the edge from Myrmidon Reef that is already at the edge, photographed by underwater photographer, scuba buddy and boat skipper Jenn Mayes.
This is Part 2 of How Climate Works. Part 1 was with Bill Kininmonth. I never properly processed the audio from Part 1, and I accepted the AI summary of our meeting click here.
************ When we say deep ocean carbon is 0‰ (per mille), we’re talking about its carbon isotope ratio, specifically the δ¹³C value. This is a measure of how much carbon-13 (¹³C) is present relative to carbon-12 (¹²C), compared to a standard reference.
In this case, 0‰ doesn’t mean there’s no carbon-13 in the deep ocean—it means the ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C in deep ocean dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) is about the same as the standard reference, which is usually the Vienna Pee Dee Belemnite (VPDB). A δ¹³C of 0‰ indicates no enrichment or depletion of ¹³C relative to that standard.
Now, why is deep ocean carbon around 0‰? It’s because the deep ocean is a massive, well-mixed reservoir of carbon that’s been cycled through various processes over long timescales. Surface ocean carbon starts with a δ¹³C of about +1 to +2‰ due to photosynthesis, where phytoplankton preferentially take up ¹²C, leaving the surface water slightly enriched in ¹³C. But as organic matter sinks and decays, it releases carbon back into the deep ocean. This process, along with the mixing of water masses, balances out the isotopic signature. The deep ocean ends up with a δ¹³C close to 0‰ because it reflects a long-term average of all these inputs—biological, physical, and chemical—without much net fractionation.
In terms of carbon-13, this means the deep ocean has a pretty stable and “neutral” amount of ¹³C compared to the global carbon cycle. It’s not heavily skewed like surface waters or organic matter (which can be -20‰ or lower due to that photosynthetic preference for ¹²C). So, a δ¹³C of 0‰ tells us the deep ocean is kind of a baseline, a big pool where carbon isotopes have settled into equilibrium over thousands of years.
Addendum by Anthony: I was skeptical (gasp!) of Marohasy’s claims, so I decided to run it through Grok, but purposely asked the question in reverse of her premise, which I thought might prompt better results.. Grok does quite well with scientific questions. It seems to agree.
Marohasy states:
Except. That ¹²C/¹³C tale’s shakier than they admit. What if the ocean’s surface, warmed by the sun, fizzes CO₂ richer in ¹²C than the deep oceans 0‰?
The Grok response to this question is below:
Grok question: On the ocean surface, does carbon dioxide with carbon 13 isotope come out of solution and into the atmosphere faster than carbon dioxide containing carbon 12 isotope?
Grok response:
Let’s dive into this intriguing question about carbon dioxide isotopologues—specifically, whether CO₂ with carbon-13 (¹³CO₂) comes out of solution and enters the atmosphere faster than CO₂ with carbon-12 (¹²CO₂) at the ocean surface. The process we’re examining is the outgassing of CO₂ from seawater into the air, and the key is to determine if the isotopic difference between ¹³C and ¹²C influences this rate.
The exchange of CO₂ between the ocean and atmosphere involves several steps: dissolved CO₂ must diffuse from the ocean’s bulk to the surface, cross the air-sea interface, and enter the gas phase. This process can be affected by both physical and chemical factors, including diffusion rates and reaction kinetics. Since ¹³C is heavier than ¹²C (atomic mass ~13 vs. ~12), we need to consider the kinetic isotope effect (KIE), where the mass difference can alter the speed of these processes.
First, let’s look at diffusion. In water, dissolved CO₂ moves toward the surface based on concentration gradients. According to Graham’s law of diffusion, the rate of diffusion is inversely proportional to the square root of the molecule’s mass. For ¹²CO₂ (molecular mass ~44) and ¹³CO₂ (molecular mass ~45), the difference is small, but ¹²CO₂ diffuses slightly faster because it’s lighter. The ratio of diffusion rates is roughly √(45/44) ≈ 1.011, meaning ¹²CO₂ moves about 1.1% faster than ¹³CO₂. This suggests that, all else being equal, ¹²CO₂ would reach the surface and outgas more quickly.
Next, there’s the chemistry. In seawater, CO₂ exists in equilibrium with carbonic acid (H₂CO₃), bicarbonate (HCO₃⁻), and carbonate (CO₃²⁻). The conversion of dissolved CO₂ to these species (and back) involves hydration/dehydration reactions, which can also exhibit a kinetic isotope effect. Because ¹³C forms slightly stronger bonds (due to its higher mass and lower vibrational frequency), reactions involving ¹³CO₂ tend to be slower. Experimental studies confirm that the hydration of ¹²CO₂ to bicarbonate is faster than for ¹³CO₂, meaning ¹²CO₂ is more readily available to outgas as it spends less time locked in these dissolved forms.
At the air-sea interface itself, the transfer of CO₂ into the atmosphere is driven by the partial pressure difference and turbulence, but isotopic fractionation can still occur. Research on gas exchange, including models and measurements of carbon isotope ratios (e.g., δ¹³C), shows that ¹²CO₂ is preferentially released into the atmosphere. This is partly because its faster diffusion and reaction kinetics give it an edge in escaping the ocean. The overall fractionation during outgassing enriches the atmosphere in ¹²C relative to ¹³C, leaving the ocean slightly enriched in ¹³C, as detailed in studies like those from NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. So, does ¹³CO₂ come out of solution faster than ¹²CO₂? No, the opposite is true. Due to its heavier mass, ¹³CO₂ diffuses more slowly, reacts more sluggishly in seawater, and crosses into the atmosphere at a slightly lower rate than ¹²CO₂. The difference is subtle—on the order of a few percent—but consistent across physical and chemical processes. Therefore, carbon dioxide with carbon-12 outgasses into the atmosphere faster than carbon dioxide with carbon-13 at the ocean surface.
While the BBC is bragging that 14% of the world’s electricity comes from “clean” hydropower, they seem to have forgotten what they wrote previously:
Dams and reservoirs around the world are an underappreciated source of methane. Now start-ups want to capture that gas as a source of power.
It takes just one second for four Olympic-sized swimming pools-worth of water to charge through the turbines at the Tucuruí dam in northern Brazil. The rush of water here at one of the largest hydroelectric reservoirs in the Amazon region is deafening, but it’s what makes the dam the fifth largest power plant in the world.
As the water churns through a series of 25 turbines and spillways of the dam, however, something else is happening – it’s emitting greenhouse gases.
Often regarded as one of the oldest forms of renewable energy, hydroelectric dams and their reservoirs are responsible for the release the equivalent of almost one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (with much of these greenhouse gas emissions in the form of methane) as water approaches and then tumbles its way through the turbines that generate electricity. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year lifespan, but it also breaks down faster in the atmosphere than CO2.
These hidden emissions mean that hydroelectricity is perhaps not as clean as it first seems.
The reason is that it’s not just water passing through the turbines – a lot of dissolved greenhouse gases flow through them too. Just as carbon dioxide dissolves in our fizzy water while under pressure, so too does methane gas dissolve in large bodies of water under certain conditions.
Now imagine you’re holding a bottle of sparkling water. Before opening it, you don’t see any bubbles inside because the carbon dioxide gas stays dissolved. As you open the lid, you hear a fizzing sound as the pressure is released and bubbles of carbon dioxide rise up. Shake that water first, and this effervescent "degassing" will most probably make your carbonated drink explode everywhere.
Something similar happens to the methane dissolved in the water from lakes when it is churned.
The last time I reported on the scientists at Colossal Biosciences, they had have created a genetically engineered mouse dubbed the “woolly mouse” as a step towards their goal of resurrecting the woolly mammoth.
The end product of their work was a new breed of mouse exhibiting several mammoth-like traits.
Now, the team has done something that I would have thought impossible: Using genetic technology to revive an animal even cuter….the dire wolf.
As with the mice, Colossal Biosciences used genetic engineering to recreate traits of the extinct dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus). Two genetically modified gray wolves, named Romulus and Remus, after the mythological twins, were born in October 2024.
These wolves were engineered using CRISPR technology to incorporate 20 genetic edits that mimic dire wolf characteristics, such as larger size, stronger jaws, broader heads, white coats, and unique vocalizations.
The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences.
Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.
And while the company may be keeping the puppies hidden from the public, Romulus and Remus have become a media sensation. Part of the excitement is based on the dire wolves being a key feature of the popular HBO series, Game of Thrones. Colossal Biosciences is claiming a “de-extinction” success, and plans now include reviving a red wolf species.
They are big, for one thing, and have dense, pale coats not found in gray wolves. Colossal, which was valued at $10 billion in January, is keeping the wolves on a private 2,000-acre facility at an undisclosed location in the northern United States.
Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal, described the wolf pups as the first successful case of de-extinction. “We’re creating these functional copies of something that used to be alive,” she said in an interview.
The animals will remain in captivity. But the technology that the company has developed could potentially help conserve species that have not yet gone extinct, such as the critically endangered red wolf, which is largely limited to North Carolina.
In 2022, red wolf-coyote hybrids were discovered in Texas and Louisiana. On Monday, Colossal also announced that it had produced four clones from the hybrids. Hypothetically, introducing these clones to North Carolina could improve the genetic diversity of the red wolf population there and help the species avoid extinction.
Interestingly, the author of Game of Thrones is an investor in the company.
And while the puppies are certainly cute, the branding of this as a “de-exctinction” is questionable.
There are other ethical considerations as well. Dire wolves were specialized predators that primarily hunted large herbivores such as bison, horses, and camels. Many of these megafaunal species either went extinct or experienced significant population declines at the end of the last Ice Age, likely due to climate change and super-charged human hunting abilities (especially when they paired up with regular dogs).
The only way these dire wolves become a revived species is
1) The entire genetic sequence is from actual dire wolves; 2) The breed on their own; and, 3) They can thrive in the wild.
I do not see this happening anytime soon.
Currently, as cute as Romulus and Remus are, they are a novelty and a species confined to zoological enclosures. But the howl is so precious.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
