NFU’s Guy Smith’s Latest Fake Climate Claims
By Paul Homewood
After complaining about “early springs” for long enough, the Guardian are moaning about how damaging the delayed start to spring is this year. And guess what, it’s down to climate change!
Last year, asparagus growers were harvesting as early as 8 April. This spring, they are not expecting to harvest their open-field crop until the last week of April – a week later than the official start of the season, St George’s Day, 23 April. Welcome to just one of the consequences of Britain’s disastrously delayed spring.
“We have had a very challenging time,” said Guy Smith, vice president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). “March breezed in with the ‘beast from the east’ and went out with the worst bank holiday on record.” For asparagus-lovers there is at least an upside. “The combination has to be right for the crowns to push through,” explained Per Hogberg, of grower Wealmoor. “The air temperature has to be at least 12C, while the soil temperature should be between 8C and 10C. With warmer weather expected, consumers can expect a bumper crop in mid-May,” he said.
It is not just asparagus growers praying for a warm, dry spell. The earlier farmers can sow, the more chance their crops have to achieve their potential. “My father was a farmer and one of his sayings was ‘a peck of dust in March was worth a king’s ransom’,” Smith said. “If the ground is nice and friable and makes a good seed-bed then it can be potentially quite lucrative for the farmer. Well, that’s gone this year.”
Farmers griping about the weather goes with the job. But Smith fears something is happening to Britain’s weather that has consequences which stretch far beyond farming.
“We farm in north-east Essex, in the driest spot in the British Isles, and so we’re keen observers of the British weather. More often now we seem to be stuck in long periods of wet months and then long periods of dry months, which is more challenging for farmers.”
Guy Smith has a history on Notalotofpeopleknowthat. Four years ago, I caught him out making fake claims about extreme weather in East Anglia, which were easily disproved.
As NFU Vice President, his roles include “Renewables and climate change”, and he seems to make a habit of making fake claims, presumably to justify his existence.
He is also on the Advisory Board of Richard Black’s ECIU.
He is clearly one of these types with an overinflated sense of self importance, who will say and do anything to attract attention.
So what about these latest claims?
Let’s start by looking at some of the basic rainfall stats for East Anglia, where Guy Smith farms:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/about/districts-map
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
Clearly there are no discernible trends, either annually or seasonally. In particular, there is no evidence of rainfall extremes growing, whether dry or wet.
But what about his specific claims that more often now we seem to be stuck in long periods of wet months and then long periods of dry months.
Analysis of the most extreme wet and dry months shows that there is nothing at all about recent weather.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
As for those “long periods of wet months and dry months”, we can test this by looking at 3-month running averages of rainfall:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
His claim is not supported by the data, which on the contrary shows just how stable East Anglia’s climate is, and has been over the last century.
It goes without saying that farmers have always been vulnerable to the weather. But they face no more problems now in East Anglia than their ancestors did in the past.
But to Guy Smith, facts like these do not matter. He would rather make up fake claims to support his global warming agenda.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Reblogged this on UPPER SONACHAN WIND FARM.
How can ANY of this be when those impartial scientists in the M O Exeter report the CET for April so far as being 2•5% HIGHER than normal.
I have been suspicious of manipulations in this area for some time now and wonder if the move down to Exeter has sent them away with the fairies, the ones with wings, not the modern version.
Sorry … degrees C
Your 2.5ºC figure is surely a mistake as it would be totally off the scale. The current CET temperature is running cooler than last year, still about 0.5ºC above the 1961-1990 baseline but that was mostly a cool period. See https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/index.html
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.htm
April 10.1°c………2.6°C above April average just as I wrote above.
Someone in authority has their thumb on the scale. It happens everywhere in this era of blatant lies and distortion.
I see what you mean although your hyperlink is missing a letter, should be https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html. The current temperature (green line) in my graphic link was only about 0.25ºC above baseline about a week ago.
It’s about time the UKMO properly used the WMO rules for anomalies. The WMO says anomaly reference periods should be the latest full 30 year period to the end of the decade.. So the UKMO should be using the reference period 1981-2010. But that wouldn’t be science as it goes against their agenda.
Birmingham, which is smack in the middle of the CET, has recorded deviation from last 20 year averages, so far this year:
Tmax Tmin Tmean
Jan 0.9 0.3 0.6
Feb -1.5 -1.5 -1.6
Mar -2.1 -1.3 -1.5
Apr (24th) 0.1 1.9 1.0
So where they get 2.6 Deg C from, who knows?
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
Meanwhile the changing Spring is wreaking havoc on birds:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/23/warming-climate-leaves-birds-hatching-late-caterpillar-harvest/
… but good news for caterpillars, and for the lesser spotted ecologist in search of the next juicy grant.
Guy Smith- climate fantasist.
Just the sort of person who goes down well with the BBC.
He’s often invited onto the BBC and his opinion is never challenged. As they say “is that true or did you hear it on the BBC?”
Onset of spring is NOT a climate parameter.
‘After complaining about “early springs” for long enough, the Guardian are moaning about how damaging the delayed start to spring is this year. And guess what, it’s down to climate change!’
Early or late spring is not climate, ipso facto, not climate change*.
*This is, if ‘climate change’ had any actual meaning.
This clearly highlights the total fallibility of human perception and memory. Guy Smith ‘feels’ large climate variations, and Paul, your excellent graphs show that east anglia has 100% swings in preception year to year. But humans have very short time-references. So Guy notes a doubling or halving in rainfall (which forcefully impacts a farmer) but then he extenuates this one year vaiance to a major change. His memory reference forgets the swings of the past. We see this all the time in media reporting. So the hurricanes in texas and florida this year were portrayed as a trend where they clearly weren’t. The weakness of human memory seems to play a huge part in exaggerating the immediate and forgetting the past. I think this weakness explains alot of the ‘confirmation bias’ well documented by Christopher Booker in his recent pamphlet. It seems homo sapiens isnt evolved enough to live on more than an annual time frame. Perhaps many, like BBC and Times reporters, cant reference more than a week.
Darn! Precipitation! Where’s spell checker when you need her?
The whole drift of government and of science is to cluster around issues in a way that satisfies your master (whoever that may be). That our futures should be guided not by the science but by the demands of political theorists and grant grabbers, by careerists who prosper by not questioning the fundamentals of what they are doing but who gain credibility by blindly enforcing diktats. I have just written a play about Sir Thomas More in which he talks about the text of his book, Utopia:
“Politics and philosophy are irreconcilable, as my story maintains. The proposition emerged that it was pointless to council a king for there was a good understanding that no matter how good a proposal might be it stands a good chance of being derided by a prince. Counselling, philosophy perhaps, is a seemingly useless function in retrospect. Royal Courts condone blind obedience and all too often base their favouritism on flattery rather than intellect.” (All related in Utopia his seminal work.)
Apparently the initials NFU are considered to stand for No F*cking Use by those they claim to represent. This would seem to be good proof of that.