An Exceptional Year? Hardly, Mr McCarthy
By Paul Homewood
According to the Met Office’s latest absurd report, we have just had a year of extremes:
2019 has been a year of extremes: record-breaking heat and rain, along with notable spells of cold and windy weather have all been prominent.
As we approach year-end, we’ve highlighted the most notable climate features of the year, including two all-time temperature records:
- Warmest winter day on record: 21.2 °C recorded at Kew Garden on 26 February
- Hottest day on record: 38.7 °C recorded at Cambridge University Botanic Gardens on 25 July
Dr Mark McCarthy is the head of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre. Commenting on 2019, he said: “2019 will be remembered as an exceptional year for weather records, as it is unusual to get both the UK summer and winter high temperature records within the same calendar year. But this continues a pattern of high-temperature records in the UK over the last few decades, as a result of our warming climate.”
This claim is largely based on an extremely hot day in July. Other claims about hottest easters and bank holidays don’t even deserve a reply, given their nonsensical nature.
The daily CET shows the usual variation around the average, but no evidence at all of the “extremes” bandied about by the Met Office, other than that single day in July:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
The year as a whole has been remarkably unremarkable, as far as temperatures are concerned, ranking only the 24th warmest on record since 1659, and not as warm as even 1733, 1779, 1834 and 1868:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
A closer look at the years since 1980 confirms that the 10-year average has been falling since 2006:
It is something I have been pointing for a while now – whatever is happening globally, England stopped warming in the early 2000s, following a step change in temperatures beginning in the mid 1980s. I would fully expect the full UK figures to show the same trend as CET when they are published.
Furthermore there is no evidence that the warming trend will return anytime soon.
Not that this will stop the Met Office from declaring in due course that ten of the warmest years have come since 2002, which they did in their review of 2018 a few months ago.
Although we have no UK data yet for December 2019, we can look at the seasonal trends for the meteorological year, Dec to Nov:
As far as temperatures go, there has been nothing extreme or out of the ordinary at all in the last 12 months:
And little out of the ordinary either concerning rainfall. Although the summer was wetter than average, rainfall totals were way down on 1912, still the wettest summer on record.
By the law of averages, you are bound to get a handful of extreme weather events every year, whether hot/cold/dry/wet. It is grossly deceitful for the Met Office to pretend that this is somehow not normal, or in McCarthy’s words “an exceptional year”.
I suggest he studies the Met Office archives, as I can guarantee he will find many years with truly exceptional weather!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.press.
Great work. Thanks for all your work over the last year.
Hear hear! Thank you Paul. As usual your amazing ‘quick-on-the-drawer’ responses to alarmist claims are to be greatly applauded.
How can this disgraceful deceit and misrepresentation of the facts be brought to account? I am appalled.
These MetO barmpots can only whistle one tune.
Before he studies the archives, he needs to study math and statistics so he isn’t mesmerized by the “records” out there. People love “records” but have zero understanding of how often they are made and broken. Plus, they have memories that go all the way back to yesterday and it wasn’t as hot yesterday as today, so it must be a record. Living math-illiterate in the moment is very dangerous.
Boris Johnson, happy New Year, and good luck draining the swamp.
The swamp resents being drained. We know…….
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
From the Met Office statements on their own records “There was no upward Trend in Temperature till 1980” .
This is very “convenient” that as soon as the consensus formed on global warming the temperature upward Trend started. This just shouts confirmation bias, and Stephen McIntyre found they just didn’t see glaring errors in record adjustments that had gone unnoticed for years.
The records of rainfall etc show no trend.But I am sure they will adjust things soon to show a trend, as they have done with sea levels.
So much for the Medieval Warm Period then. These jokers are trying to get away with murder of the truth.
Oddly, the so called record high temperature in Cambridge was a singular recording station. Of the FOUR other recording stations within one mile of the one stated, they all showed 3 or 4 degrees cooler at the time of the so called record temperature.
Did you ever see a photo of the weather station at the botanic gardens, I think it was carried here. The site is very compromised by the considerable growth of Cambridge in recent years, it is very close to the railway station and a huge new building with hundreds of solar panels on the roof has been built in close proximity.
It should never have accepted by the met office
‘As we approach year-end, we’ve highlighted the most notable climate features of the year, including two all-time temperature records’
Uh oh! Somebody doesn’t know what CLIMATE means. IT DOES NOT HAVE FEATURES. It is the generalized weather for an area or region. RECORD WEATHER MEANS NOTHING!!!!
This is from the Met Office? OMG! Are they really this ignorant ?!?!
Not very scientific, but if you kept CET maximum temperature records long enough, chance would dictate that you would gradually infill the ‘highest in record’ peaks to create a smooth curve joining all the existing peaks – and in that respect, drawing in that curve by eye, extrapolating the peak a bit rather than flat-lining, even that exceptionally hot day in July looks like it was due sooner or later.
It’s probably easy to forget but late last winter/spring the weather was being blamed for moor and forest fires all over the UK. Ashdown Forest fire was started by negligent controlled burning, and arrests were made for all the moor fires I believe. One fire was started by stupidity – a BBQ – now illegal. All the news reports carried final tag lines, “it was 17C today should only be 9C” etc. or references to exceptional dryness and heat. What that has to do with negligence/arson I don’t know, but obviously the insinuation was that climate change was to blame. The authorities/media refuse to mention pyro-terrorism (from ISIS or eco-fanatics). Who knows the motive…….
https://metro.co.uk/2019/08/23/ilkley-moor-arsonist-jailed-two-years-10617720/
Ashdown Forest isn’t a forest in the usual modern sense of woodland. It’s heathland.
Climate-Related Deaths Are Falling
Death rates from air pollution declined by almost a fifth world-wide and a quarter in China between 2007 and 2017, according to the online publication Our World in Data.
Annual deaths from climate-related disasters declined by one-third between 2000-09 and 2010-15, to 0.35 per 100,000 people, according to the International Database of Disasters—a 95% reduction since the 1960s. That’s not because of fewer disasters, but better capabilities to deal with them.
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/lomborg-global-deaths-from-climate-and-non-climate-catastrophes-1920-2018-figure-3a-_900w.png?itok=M9cnRgip
The brief Saharan plumes were during negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, so they will be more common during centennial solar minima. They could not occur during positive NAO conditions with a more northerly zonal jet stream pattern. Rising CO2 forcing should in theory increase positive NAO conditions.
The only thing that the Met Office is concerned about is perpetuating the climate change scam. As long as they can keep the scare going and keep the funding rolling in, the truth will be kept from the general public.
A fine piece, but I’d dump that “…law of averages…” guff.
We’ve jsiut had a record year for grain harvest. You don’t get that with an extreme weather.
Since we are complaining about this sort of stuff, wouldn’t you have to look at yield to make that claim?
So as usual we had very few average days. That’s the thing with UK, whenever do average.
Is there any actual statistical analysis in the report or is it simply this sub-GCSE average nonsense?
We never do average…
The weather in 2019 where I live was unbelievably average. I can’t recall anything worth recalling, it was so average. Perhaps it is extreme when we get average weather.
Hi Paul, quick typo alert, ‘very’ should be ‘every’ in your penultimate paragraph but, as per usual, a good all round demolition of the usual Met Office alarmist nonsense. Out of interest, I note our future king, Prince William, was all over the MSM yesterday claiming we only had 10 years to save the planet from climate change. I do believe there’s another future king out there somewhere, they may even be related, who made similar claims ooh, about 10 years or so ago. How’s that prediction going? For a little New Year festive fun you might give us all a laugh by comparing Charlie’s & Willie’s doom mongering?
Paul, Happy New Year!
Do you have a link to the exact observations (including time of obs) for the temperature record sites?
Before c1980, temperatures were recorded by manual sightings of mercury thermometers ( margin of error up to 10 deg C, according to the Met Office). After c1980, temperatures have been increasingly (now totally, I suspect) recorded by Platinum Electric Thermometers (margin of error less than 0.2 deg C)
The earlier observations were taken and recorded either every hour or every six-hours, whereas the modern observations are taken almost constantly and recorded every minute.
It is therefore logical that modern extreme temperatures are more likely to be recorded as the automatic observations can be recorded between the hours. E.g, at 1431, as opposed to either 1400 or 1500.
This means that, once again, the Met Office is guilty of comparing apples and oranges. One cannot honestly compare measurements at an individual site post c1980 with pre c1980 as the dataset is not the same. It is like comparing ice proxy data with thermometer data. Who is to say that a previous record in, say, 1912 was not missed between the tops of the hour?
It is therefore dishonest for the UKMO to claim a modern record temperature against any temperature before c1980 without caveat.
If you could link to the UKMO official data including time of observation, I’d appreciate seeing it.
Regards,
Arfur
All this is “adjusted” for by the Met Office and the records do come with confidence intervals and error bands, but you have to delve deep into the stuff to find out how they adjust.
It is a fact that the adjustments made are in excess of the anomaly being measured, and the adjustment for increased urbanisation has a negative effect on historic records.
So it is almost meaningless to say that the last ten years have been the warmest in the record because the adjustments made to detect a trend, make this almost certain, but it isn’t untrue, just pointless saying it unless you want to mislead.
Hi John,
Yes, it is a shame that error bars are not obvious in the UKMO Press releases.
Also, it is difficult to reconcile exactly how they ‘adjust’ for the missing 59 observations between the tops of the hour!
Arfur
How much longer can the Met Office and others keep their bizarre show on the road before a long suffering public call a halt to all the wrong outcomes that have ensued from the Great Scam ? Higher electricity costs , anti – diesel , BBC bias , anti – cow , wind turbines , biomass to name just a few .
BBC R5Live relentless Oz fire coverage, gave a long rant over to some website running climate activist declaring the anger over Morrison’s failure to blame climate change. Ranted over fossil fuel subsidies (the usual lie), the cost of damage from using fossil fuels (ignoring the vastly outweighing benefits), said China is not a big polluter and Oz is (tired ‘per capita’ false logic), and emotional cries of pain describing children hiding in the sea to escape the fires. But not one piece of actual evidence linking the fires to climate change was offered – as per usual.
BBC 5 Live are leading most of their current news bulletins with the Aussie forest fires story. Think about that for a second; they’re literally leading UK news with a weather story from the *other side of the planet*!
Propaganda, much?
Cheshire red said –
“they’re literally leading UK news with a weather story from the *other side of the planet*!
Propaganda, much?”
it’s relentless pushing/Propaganda from all channels at the moment (they all seem to read from the same crib sheet)
Paul. Good stuff. Can you not shame (?) McCarthy to respond? To whom is he ultimately responsible? If the country is to plan. (For a decade under Boris?) It needs to know what it is planning for. Amongst a host of problems to solve, the country deserves to know what to plan for with weather estimates. Not girlie scare stories. Keep going. Derek Tughan.
>
Happy New Year.
My village council (pop. 2000) has just declared a Climate Emergency. Looking at these stats. I cannot see any emergency. Support for solar farm is one of their emergency policies.
Lots of local councils have, they’re being encouraged by central government to do so.
Yes, the councils are all short of money for essential services, but collectively they can find £millions to solve the “climate emergency”.
I hope someone advising No10 subscribes to this essential briefing
Walking above Ambleside New Tear’s Eve. Frost lingering in sheltered areas. Sunny, air so clear you could see the patches of snow on the furthest Langdale Pikes. Thanks to autumn rain spectacular waterfalls at High Sweden Bridge. If this is climate change, I love it.
‘It’s been a year of extremes. We predicted 39C in July but were very disappointed when the maximum only reached 38.1C, failing to beat the record maximum of 38.5C. *Sad faces*. So imagine our joy when, the next day, we were alerted to the fact that a thermometer in Cambridge Botanic Gardens actually did break the current UK record, so then we were very happy, even though the magic 39C didn’t happen. We didn’t mention of course that two days earlier (on 23rd July) the thermometer in question suffered battery failure and the historic data is, to say the least, patchy, but that’s not at all relevant.’
Not to mention newish concrete and glass edifice, an enormous ‘patio’, enough aircon heat outlets on the roof to run a small city, an environmentally controlled growing house, cafe/restaurant extraction………..
And yet no doubt expressed about the accuracy by the MO.
When will they understand that their daily doses of scare-mongering are not a solution to the climate crisis and the emergency they themselves created right after the climate stopped cooling in 1975? It is tiresome to keep reading that we have only a few years to do something when that something is not possible. The data, right or wrong, don’t matter anymore anyhow. A truly bizarre situation.
I’m sorry but I don’t know where else to post this. Please what is wrong with this experiment as it seems to fly in the face of all the evidence from elsewhere.
(1) Is lamp heating each bottle exactly the same amount or is it pointed more at one.
(2) Is air pressure same in both bottles (those tablets can cause enough pressure in a confined space to launch a rocket!).
(3) Is rate of water evaporation (thermally dynamic) the same – has effective surface area been increased by fizz.
(4) Is water vapour/droplet content in the air the same (water vapour is far stronger GHG).
(5) Is clarity/composition/bubble content of the water same – does solution produced have different heat absorption properties to plain water.
(6) The thermal dynamics of the tablet reaction.
(7) Is the heat in appropriate CO2 absorption/emission bands, does it get through plastic.
(8) Do water droplets (from fizz) on inside of plastic affect heat absorption.
(9) Actual proof of CO2 content in both.
(10) Is claimed heat rise consistent with CO2 potential (scientifically expected) – NO!
There’s probably dozens of other serious issues/unknowns. To suggest it demonstrates the (scientifically inaccurately named) greenhouse effect of CO2 is risible.
Very many thanks for your answer. I thought it was too good to be true. The same source elsewhere claims that because CO2 is invisible to visible light it becomes a major factor in global warming. This doesn’t seem to make sense either.
So, carbon dioxide absorbs infra-red radiation. Everybody knows that.
An Alka-seltzer tablet contains about 2 grams of sodium bicarbonate. The experiment shown would probably evolve enough carbon dioxide to push out and replace all the air in the bottle. That is, the amount of carbon dioxide in the fizzing bottle might be 2,000 times the amount of carbon dioxide in the normal air in the other bottle. Of course, nobody knows exactly what goes on with such a crude and sloppy experiment, but it is certainly not an experiment on a trace gas, which is the status of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
That “demonstration” is not even junk science. It is the level of a conjurors trick. Now, an experiment in which the amount of carbon dioxide were 300 parts by million in one bottle and 400 parts by million in a second and 500 parts per million in a third, would actually be interesting, as it would reproduce the so-called “developing catastrophe.”
An alternative experiment would be to compare bottles of water one half-filled with normal air and one with air scrubbed of carbon dioxide – and dump the flashy Alka-Seltzer nonsense.
“…CO2 invisible to visible light…”
The idea here is that sunlight can go through carbon dioxide on its way in.
However, half of sunlight’s energy is in the infrared, and so the argument is weakened. In fact, only about half of sunlight’s energy reaches to the land or sea surface directly. All sorts of reasons for that.
This is really just too stupid to be true. The current CO2 level in air is around 4 parts per million. Was the guy did was increase the CO2 in the bottle by about a thousand or million times more than that- no wonder the temp went sky-high. Very bad science and they scare kids with this stuff- it’s child abuse. I worry what they will teach my grandsons when they reach school age.
Carbon dioxide does absorb thermal radiation and with the substantial dose of Alka Salza used, its partial pressure would far exceed the partial pressure of the moisture above cool water. So that the carbon dioxide dominated the radiative absorption in that case as the gas absorption coefficient was substantially increased.
Much more controlled experiments have been done using bottles with the gas closer to atmospheric mixtures and have shown no measurable effect of the CO2 in similar experiments, e.g. Jan-Erik Solheim: The Greenhouse Effect – a high school experiment: London Conference on Climate Change: Science and Geoethics; Session 4;2016.
It is interesting, given the importance of the topic, that so little research has been done on the radiative properties of mixtures of CO2 and H2O since the 1940s. The “climate scientists” do not even understand Hottel’s old papers on the emissive effect of mixtures being less than the sum of the components: they assume some magical increase from an imaginary feedback mechanism.
Well done Paul for this item. I read this report a week ago . They Met Office are supposedly a world authority on climate science yet this piece of vast exaggeration from them is no different to the lies and scaremongering we get on a daily basis from the BBC. Candidly, I think the Met Office should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
“Dr Mark McCarthy is the head of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre”
My qns
Is “Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre” an information centre or a NARRATIVE PUSHING centre ?
Is @markpmcc a science guy, or PR guy ?
Well is his report news … or is it PR ?
He seems to tweet a lot of anecdotal things
Some regular here like Barry might have a better understanding of him.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/mark-mccarthy
BTW the pic of the Met Office HQ
I tend to think that glassbox buildings are inherently unecological.
Here’s the Met O PR tweet
(I guess my previous comment is still awaiting moderation)
Paul I’m still catching up I just looked at Laura Tobin thread
I think we have to be careful, cos such TV totty can have enormous impact
This Met Office boss has 3,000 Twitter followers and she has 130,000
However on Twitter the replies to her I see are all skeptics.
And there is a new thing in the UK, in that TVland is now a fairly small reach
She probably only has 1 million viewers out of the 60 million population.
An interesting response to Sky News’s fake Climate Catastrophe bit on Victoria Falls drying up FOR EVER….from a guy called Peter Jones on FB. http://www.facebook.com/peterrojones/posts/10157116945378821
Carbon dioxide does absorb thermal radiation and with the substantial dose of Alka Salza used, its partial pressure would far exceed the partial pressure of the moisture above cool water. So that the carbon dioxide dominated the radiative absorption in that case as the gas absorption coefficient was substantially increased.
Much more controlled experiments have been done with the gas closer to atmospheric mixtures and have shown no measurable effect of the CO2 in similar experiments, e.g. Jan-Erik Solheim: The Greenhouse Effect – a high school experiment: London Conference on Climate Change: Science and Geoethics; Session 4;2016.
It is interesting, given the importance of the topic, that so little research has been done on the radiative properties of mixtures of CO2 and H2O since the 1940s. The “climate scientists” do not even understand Hottel’s old papers on the emissive effect of mixtures being less than the sum of the components: they assume some magical increase from an imaginary feedback mechanism.
Oh my 9pm comment didn’t material so I will type it back in from memory
So is what he said new or is it PR ?
Is @markpmcc a science guy or a PR guy ?
Is “the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre”
really a narrative pushing centre ?
… I would say it is
@markpmcc Tweets are not full on alarmist, but he does tweet a lot of “anecdotal” events
His Met Office job page
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/mark-mccarthy
BTW note the pic of the Met Office HQ
I tend to think that such glassbox buildings are NOT ecological
cos of the energy used to make the glass, its lifespan, and energy loss in practical use
The CET was interesting in 2019 as there were about 20 days above the 5-percentile for the maximum, but only one below the 5-percentile for the minimum. Normally you would expect to see roughly the same, averaging 7 days above the record maximum and 7 below record minimum for the 140-year record. This pattern is consistent with the main warming effect we are seeing recently being due to fewer cold nights.
New keeps saying for example
” records have been broken it was 19.1C making it the warmest December day ever”
.. that to is a fallacy
#1 A “peak temperature day” is more easily recorded these days cos we have continuous monitoring compared to 20 data times/day in the old days.
#2 A “peak temperature day” could indicate “a warm day”
but is not synonymous eg if the day has sudden warmth for 20 minutes that doesn’t the whole day was warm.
Imagine
but media do treat them as synonymous.
Reblogged this on WeatherAction News and commented:
Today the BBC, who may or not be in the last throes of death as the axe awaits the licence, reported:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50976909
So despite the paroxysms over the past decade it wasn’t the hottest, nor the wettest. So when Paul writes:
He’s not wrong is he?