Rising Temperatures, Sunshine Hours & The Clean Air Acts
By Paul Homewood
Back in 2006, the Met Office published the “Climate Memorandum No 21” Report. The original link I had no longer works, but it is still there on Wayback:
It looks at a full range of climate data, to identify trends and correlations since 1910, but I was particularly interested in the data on sunshine hours:
Most regions had seen significant increases in sunshine hours. The exceptions were N Scotland, N Ireland and SW England, all largely unaffected by air pollution. Note the report’s comment that this could be the result of Clean Air Acts of 1956 onwards.
But what effect could this have?
The Report sums up the relationship between all of the variables. (Remember that the correlation co-efficient goes from 0 to 1, with 1 being a perfect correlation, and even 0.7 being a “strong linear relationship” (see here). Zero, of course, tells us there is no relationship. Minus co-efficients work the same way, except the relationship is negative – eg more sum = less rain).
There is a particularly strong correlation between sunshine and mean temperatures in both spring and autumn, though surprisingly less so in summer. In winter there is a weak negative relationship. As the Report states:
There is quite a strong positive correlation between maximum temperature and sunshine, especially in the spring and autumn, with values of r up to 0.85. Minimum temperature is negatively correlated with sunshine in the winter, and positively correlated in spring and autumn, but with lower values of r than for maximum temperature.
It also includes these maps:.
The biggest increases are in winter, but of course these are percentages, so will translate into relatively smaller increases in hours.
So we have:
1) An increase in sunshine hours over the record.
2) The strong likelihood that this is at least partly due to reduced air pollution.
3) Strong correlation between that increase in sunshine, and the rise in mean temperatures over the period.
One question remains. The Met Office knew all of this in 2006, yet as far as I am aware the question of sunshine trends has largely been ignored by them since. Instead, with classic tunnel vision, they look no further than CO2 to explain the small rise in temperatures over the last few decades.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Reblogged this on Roald J. Larsen and commented:
Facts is a huge inconvenience in FRAUD!
Clean Air Acts of various types were implemented throughout the western world over the 1960s and 1970s massively reducing sulphur and particulate emissions. This emissions-reduction technology has been used in India and China and their emissions have been nothing like the earlier values. Apart from direct sunshine, cloud cover has been reduced – probably directly related to the sunshine hours, reducing the albedo of the planet.
Sadly the CO2 hypothesis was adopted by all the decision-makers such as our parliament and the brainwashing-media and no open debate was allowed to prevent any other views being considered.
Jack, there was no sign of emissions reduction in Beijing in 1996 on our last visit. And other people on our party that visited Shanghai, said it was much worse. Since then the increased burning of low grade coal will have made the situation worse – China’s coal consumption is now four times that of 1996. But you are right about the brain-washing of our political leaders. I never met a computer modeller that had a grasp of physics higher than secondary school. Most accept stock textbook formulas as holy writ, not to be questioned.
China tried to buy large quantities of high grade coal from Montana mines shipped through Vancouver on the west coast a decade ago The plan was to convert the industrial users over from the cheap, low grade nearby sources to more expensive coal from distant sources. The project was blocked in Vancouver by the greens using direct action. Coal is dirty, you see. It cannot be allowed to ship from North America.
To this day, China imports (and burns) large amounts of low grade coal from Indonesia and Mongolia. Not only does this cause much more pollution but it releases way more CO2 than the high grade stuff. The high grade coal releases less CO2 in the process of utilization but the whole point of the plan was to modernize the aged burners so as to be more efficient and implement environmental safeguards, This would have dramatically reduced harmful emissions as well as CO2 release. But, alas….
A double own goal by the Greens. More pollution and more CO2. Actually, a triple own goal because they are proud of their achievement with this action.
“…a grasp of physics higher than secondary school…”
I doubt they have a grasp of physics at all.
There is the infamous documentary of interviews with newly minted graduates of Harvard University, who one and all had the most tenaciously held and completely wrong scientific ideas. Most of them thought the cause of the Seasons was the Earth regularly approaching and receding from the Sun! How they reconciled this with the fact that Winter in the Northern Hemisphere and Summer in the Southern happen at the same time, was not clarified. Perhaps they did not know this to be the case.
The clean air acts in the UK did reduce air pollution by 75% in the last 50 years .
Note, the huge reduction in traffic during lockdown had no effect on totals as vehicles are very clean running now .https://airqualitynews.com/2020/09/08/pm2-5-pollution-did-not-decline-during-lockdown-in-scotland/
But the greens and the media did their best to try to hide this fact .
The propaganda will still keep claiming the world is getting hotter , and a lot of work is going into changing temperature records so that they can keep saying “Hottest year ever “.
I have found this site which shows temp records from all across the world . http://temperature.global/
And it shows that the last 5 years have all been below normal , although that is only for a 30 year average .
Useful links. Thank you.
And this is the link to the government’s figures on air pollution since 1970
Click to access Statistics-air-pollutants-2017-defra.pdf
The cessation of the agricultural practice of stubble burning maybe a factor in all this extra sunshine.
The UK ceased stubble burning in 1993.
Paul, this is something that those of us old enough to have lived through that period have been deeply suspicious of. The first time I visited Lincoln in the late 1950s, it was a forest of industrial chimneys and black, even the cathedral was black! Now it is sparkling clean. The change in temperature correlates strongly with Britain’s decline in manufacturing industry and the shipping of most manufacturing effort to Asia. Having been to Beijing and experienced the dreadful winter smogs in that city, it gave us a taste of what industrial Britain was like in its heyday in 1913. Britain’s peak consumption of coal was 292 milliom tons a year – China’s is now over 4000 million tons a year! The change in pollution levels over the area of our small island had a dramatic effect on the local climate – such a huge increase in particulate and aerosol pollution over the large area of a country the size of China must have an effect on the whole of the planet’s weather distribution.
It does appear that a recently awarded Nobel Prize for physics for ‘proving’ that climate change is purely down to CO2 might be judged dubious. If CO2 is the sole cause of ‘climate change’ why was there no tipping point during, until at the end, of the Carboniferous age when greedy plants had reduced the level of CO2 back to a much lower level? CO2 levels at the beginning of the Carboniferous were of the order of 3200ppm, 8 times higher than today and due to the increase oxygen levels to 32%, giant insects flourished. But no sign of the ‘tipping point’ predicted by the current models.
I note that one of the recipients had the award for climate modelling in the 1960s – I know of no modelling method current in the 1960s that would have made such a prediction accurate in the long term.
It’s widely accepted that the Eemian, 150k years ago, was perhaps 2C warmer than today. As far as we can tell, it was just warmer. No tipping points, no extremes, just warmer, probably because of the Earth’s obliquity. That the position of the Earth relative to the sun changes over time appears to be ignored by climate scientists (some probably doneven know about it) which seems odd if climate is a chaotic system subject to big changes from very small initial changes.
Phoenix 44: You address a subject about which I know nothing but have posted on occasions that until we understand the causes of ice ages and tropical periods we won’t understand modern climate. Based on pure ignorance I suggested that the drive might be variations in orbit. Could this “obliquity” be the answer to everything?
Vernon, obliquity is essentially the angle of the Earth on its axis (i.e. as it spins) versus its angle to the ecliptic (the angle of its orbit round the sun). We have seasons because the axis is tilted by around 22-24 degrees. That angle changes all the time though due to the influence of various other bodies in the solar system. There are various cycles of movements associated with the ice ages, but also other cycles that cause lesser climate changes. What we do know is that 22 degrees or so is enough to give us the substantial difference between winter and summer, so a one degree change in that 22 might result in quite large differences in climate. And as I said, if climate is chaotic, small changes can result in large changes. As far as I know, we know virtually nothing about the changes to climate from changes in obliquity or other movements, so I’m unsure how we have ruled them out as causing climate change.
Vernon; it’s well worth reading up on Milankovich Cycles which influence climate through:
Obliquity – as well-explained by Phoenix already
Eccentricity – variations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun – an ellipse which varies in shape over time, changing our distance from the sun at different times of year.
Precession – over time the earth’s orientation relative to the sun changes so that the point in the year when we are closest to the sun varies in a regular cycle. For example, our closest point occurs in January at the moment (counter-intuitively for us in the northern hemisphere when you would expect it to be during the height of summer). In 10 – 15,000 years it will occur in July and then slowly move on, back to January again.
There’s a good explanation and illustrations of all this here:
https://sites.google.com/site/bensonfamilyhomepage/Home/ice-age-and-global-warming
You need to scroll down to about halfway.
Going further, there’s Henrik Svensmark’s theory that cosmic rays have a strong influence on our climate and their behaviour varies with that of our sun and our planetary system’s movement through the galaxy (If I’ve understood it in outline!).
It’s a good job that “the science is settled” otherwise people might think that there are more factors at play than just CO2!
As I have said before- when you know the answer why would you look elsewhere??
Well you would if you were doing science, but climate science stopped that long ago.
So the link doesn’t work – are they trying to hide an inconvenient report? Given their record of lying by omission and just outright lying, you would think they were.
I worked at Manchester University Pollution Research Unit back in the early 80s. One of the projects I worked on was the impact of air pollution on sunshine. My recollection is that we found that in the Greater Manchester area winter sunshine within the centre of the conurbation doubled between the late 1950s and the 1980s, with lesser increases in spring and autumn and summer. If you look at the sunshine records from central Manchester and other inland Lancashire industrial towns the average total sunshine for a year in the 1920s-1940s was about 1,000-1,100 hours a year (Oldham Road in Manchester famously had an average annual sunshine of only some 900 hours a year!!). Nowadays it would be 1,300 to 1,350. The impact on temperature also occurs – at least in winter – in an indirect way. The dirty air led to many more winter fogs and persistent winter fogs, in temperature inversions, in those days. This resulted in colder winter days (sometimes sub-zero C), whereas now, without smoke and fog, the inversions tend to break down and winter days are less cold in the same weather situation, even though the direct warming effect of the sun in winter is low.
Of course cause and effect could be the other way round (higher temperatures cause fewer clouds) or both could be caused by the same thing.
I slightly dubious about pollution though – the graph of sunshine shows no real change until perhaps 1985, which is surely too late?
The key point is perhaps that we do understand clouds and can’t model them. If there is a clear linear relationship between clouds and temperature but the models don’t include that, then the models are very unlikely to right.
*don’t understand clouds*
I found it a little difficult comparing the two charts at the top of the piece by eye, because of the different time periods covered. So I cut off the data before 1920 on the temperature chart and stretched it to match the upper chart. I find that if one takes the peaks of sunshine duration these correlate with rather more temperature peaks than would be expected from chance. I would guess that a proper statistical check would yield a significant positive result. Poor old carbon dioxide seems to be squeezed out of this picture. The Clean Air Act in the UK came in in 1956. As in a small land mass like the UK there are air movements from elsewhere and many other factors that could affect mean temperatures. I leave it to others to consider whether there is a statistical difference between the period before of after 1956.
This is about contrails left by aircraft and the correlation between them and temperature .
https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies-after-911-set-the-stage-for-an-unlikely-climate-change-experiment/
It points to a connection but is undecided about the outcome.
Curiously, there do not appear to have been any similar claims about the much greater reduction in aviation over the Covid period, which would have been expected to have a much more marked effect.
I wonder why…
Whenever we get to this point – I always look up this little article over at Jo Nova’s website back in 2011 (one of my earliest bookmarks).
So we had good evidence a decade ago (and a lot ealier really) that CO2 was not the whole answer, or even any of the answer.
https://joannenova.com.au/2011/02/the-oceans-clouds-and-cosmic-rays-drive-the-climate-not-co2/
This was February 2011 and sadly Noor Van Andel passed away in April 2011.
The counter evidence to the “it’s CO2 wot dun guv” people mounts ever more, but it will take those that have been living off the “industry”, especially in academia to see the truth and repent to change anything. BUT too many have a vested interest in the continuation of their sinecure and its sizeable pension to stick their heads above the parapet.
Those who are modelling are just parametrising to get the answer they want. Modellers have always loved their models and are difficult to convince that they are not that good. Now not only does the physics appear to be flawed (as to CO2 and blackbody radiation) but Ross McKitrick has discovered flawed statistical assumptions on attribution of model output. The sort of stuff we get every day – plant drought loving plants as we will soon be like the North Africa. More flooding etc. etc.
It is no co-incidence that many of those who have become more sceptical and have spoken out are usually retired and are now less threatened with loss of grants etc. and inevitable abuse they receive. Those who are younger and honest scientists deserve our support and respect.
If you pitch up at the Hadley Centre and say that you would like a job investigating the above empirical data from 2011 – all you would hear would be “next”.
T. Walker and Andrew – What Judith Curry clams is correct – the Gauss-Markov method is only applicable where vectoral perturbation events are completely random and the perturbed system has an invariant central value. These essential conditions can only be achieved in a mathematically linear system – and that mathematical linearity has to be maintained over all the conditions in the data set. No non-linear system complies with these conditions. It is obvious, to all but a complete physical numbskull, that if weather does not comply with such strictures then the resultant climate cannot be completely accounted for by the use of long-term averaging and ‘smoothing’ of data. Historical data can be averaged because it is a postpriori operarion and even if we don’t understand the full mechanisms producing that data, limited conclusions can be drawn, but I hope that no-one would use them to ‘predict’ a future! As the work of Howell Tong shows (Non-linear Time Series – a Dynamical Approach, Oxford 1990, section 6.2), this is an area where prediction is mathematically very complex. The assumption in a Markov chain is that all perturbing events are random with no temporal or magnitude dependence from event to event and at some future point, stationarity of the data is essential. However, in weather, and in climate, the interdependence of events is incontrovertible.
Am I correct in thinking that this might explain the step rise in temperatures during the 90’s to 2006? If so, this would be another nail in the coffin of CO2 as the cause of warming.
You need to be careful with that. A number of Alarmists have claimed that temperatures started to rise earlier than seen but were masked by pollution producing either aerosols or clouds that reflected heat to space. The fundamental questions is: if the atmosphere is heated by additional CO2, what happens to clouds? I’m not sure we know. if the atmosphere absorbs more water doesn’t that mean more clouds? The trouble is, nobody wants to know in case the answer isn’t “right”.
If you plot 1919 – 1969 Met Office UK monthly average sunshine hours against monthly average temperatures you get a correlation coefficient of 0.9577. Using this to predict temperatures from 1919 to 2020 assuming it is purely driven by sunshine hours you can see that the residual which could be due to CO2 is utterly trivial and has a correlation coefficient with CO2 of 0.0294. The correlation of the residual with the AMO is much better.
Yes but does CO2 influence clouds? Does sunshine influence clouds rather than the other way round?
Or is it as I suspect (!) a complex, non-linear system in which everything interacts with everything and which is therefore impossible to model?
I think clouds are largely initiated by cosmic rays, and these vary as the Earth moves around its orbit, and a percentage get deflect by the Sun’s magnetic field which also varies.
Thanks Andrew- much as I expected (in my piece above)
I’ve just done an analysis which confirms temperature lags behind sunshine. In other words the warming is caused by increased sunshine, not the clouds are driven off by increased warmth.
One of the factors in air pollution reduction that constantly is ignored is the change from steam trains to diesel and then electric. I can remember the post-war queues of goods trains sitting stationery at signals waiting their turn for a section of line to be clear. Black smoke belching in all directions.
Correlations require several “wiggles” to be reliable, i.e. both variables need to go up and down several times together, otherwise the rise in temperature could be linked to my rise in weight.
Bjørn Lomborg says that if you plot UK pollution versus years there’s no sign of the Clean Air Act having any effect: pollution was already declining and continued to do so at the same rate. I interpret this to mean that the economics that led to coal being replaced by oil was the major cause plus, perhaps especially in London, the decline in manufacturing industry.
Yes, and no. The generality across the UK is probably true. The Clean Air Act gave powers to local authorities to declare ‘smokeless zones’ and these were mostly in the big cities, starting in the central areas. Suburbs and rural areas and small towns were not affected. But the local impact on and in big cities was enormous. Across the rest of the country, as you say, it was the economic shift of industry to non-coal furnaces and then in the late 1960s onwards the switch to gas fired central heating in homes. However, the Clean Air Act did have a major affect within the main city areas – i know I did some research on it. The difference in sunshine between central Manchester and the surrounding countryside used to be 2-300 hours a year in the 1950s, whereas by the 1980s the countryside and city areas had about the same sunshine.
Paul,
I have this saved on my PC from 2006!
I wrote to Mathew Perry in 2006 when this was first issued on several things contained in his report. He replied respectfully and helpfully to my novice questions.
The sunshine hours come from many site records and different recording instruments all of which had to be homogenised to produce the analysis.
Decrease in air pollution and decrease in fog days is often ignored.
However the most interesting statement in the summary of report is:-
“However, there was virtually no trend in mean temperature between 1914 and 1987, and it is only since 1987 that the temperature has notably started to increase. The winter is the only season which has not seen significant increases during the 1914 – 2004 period.”
So no temperature trend till it became the consensus that there should be an upward trend, and then one was found.
Try it for England and you will get an even better match.