State Of The UK Climate 2022
By Paul Homewood
London, 15 June – The Global Warming Policy Foundation has just published its annual review of the UK’s weather. Once again, author Paul Homewood finds little to be alarmed about.
Although 2022 was a comparatively warm year, the long-term mean temperature has been largely unchanged since the turn of the century. Rainfall and storm trends are, respectively, unexceptional and favourable.
Homewood says:
"The UK climate remains absolutely benign. The changes we have seen have been small, and mostly thoroughly welcome. Who would complain that we are seeing fewer bitterly cold winters?"
GWPF director, Dr Benny Peiser said:
"It’s extraordinary that we are impoverishing our economy and households in an utopian attempt to achieve Net Zero at any cost, when the UK’s long-term climate trends have remained relatively stable and pleasant."
Paul Homewood: The UK’s weather in 2022 (pdf)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
According to the Met Office, the UK climate “is continuing to change” (8), whilst weather is becoming more extreme (9).
But what does the actual evidence tell us?
Using official data up to 2021, from the Met Office and other sources, this paper examines UK climate trends, and assesses the truth of these claims.
The results are as follows:
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Although 2022 was the warmest on record in the UK, there has been no increase in long term averages since the early 2000s.
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The annual temperature in 2022 was well within the bounds of natural variability, and was largely due to long spells of sunny weather in spring and summer.
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The summer of 2022 was only the 4th hottest according to CET, and not as hot as 1976, 1826 and 1995.
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Annual rainfall last year was only slightly below average
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The number of days with extreme temperatures is not increasing, as fewer cold days are offsetting more hot ones.
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Long term averages in rainfall in England & Wales, which have been rising since the 1970s, are similar to the 1870s and 1920s.
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While winters have become slightly wetter, there is little change in the other seasons. In particular, summers are not getting drier, as projections have suggested.
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Rainfall is not becoming more extreme, whether on an annual, monthly or daily basis
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Sea levels have been rising at around 1.7mm a year around the UK, after taking account of vertical land movement, and there has been no acceleration in the rate of rise on multi-decadal scales
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Wind storms have been declining in frequency and intensity since the 1990s
In short, although it is slightly warmer than it used to be, the UK climate has changed very little. Long-term trends are dwarfed by the natural variability of weather.
Nor is there any evidence that weather is becoming more extreme. Nothing in the data indicates that climate will become more extreme in future.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Paul, there’s a wonderful debunking of the knee-jerk attribution of any weather incident as climate change blamed on mankind by Lionel Shriver in today’s (15/6) Spectator. It’s at https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-weather-isnt-climate-change/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020230615%20%20AL%20%20Bloomsbury+CID_50b3ca5a06ca5bc50970fab4d7dc639c
All we need now is the authorities who are condemning our grandchildren to be paupers to read and learn and stop the idiotic drive towards the mythical “net zero”!
Thank you terryfwall, an excellent read.
I wondered if a firewall would prevent anyone reading it, delighted to see that it hasn’t, thanks.
Nah! Sorry, Paul, that kind of thing won’t fill the troughs for the greenie leeches. Much more alarmist bullcrap required – put some effort in, man!
Meanwhile across the pond in West Virginia…..we are having a very cool “spring/summer”.
The GWPF summary says that there has been an acceleration in sea-level rise. your document says that there has not, maybe worth a GWPF typo correction?
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Thanks Paul. A very useful resource.
Crazy that your first graph shows a warming trend in 100 years; contemporary measurements are a hoax, so often at vast seas of tarmac at airports, with taxiing planes and air con units pumping out heat. All the weather stations with low figures have been quietly ‘retired’.
Once again our young (and the gullible) are being told that Climate is effecting the weather, yet I was under the impression that weather made the climate.
And this is false: ‘In short, although it is slightly warmer than it used to be, the UK climate has changed very little.’
UK climate has not changed at all. Not in a hundred years.
It’s worse – our young are being told at School that “climate collapse” is imminent unless we rapidly get to net zero, and that Britain alone reaching net zero will somehow save our climate from catastrophe.
This is a modern version of Priests preaching hellfire unless the peasants behaved themselves.
I feel inadequate as I am ignoring the impact on younger children – my grandkids are 15-19 and are intelligent enough to have treated the school and media messages with the proper breadth of rejection and acceptance that seems proper to me. My comments make them think but, more importantly, their comments make me reconsider some of my views.
Perhaps I am more sanguine regarding the following phalanx of youngsters – the idea of “give me the child until they are 7 and I will give you the adult” (rewritten for this era) is both wrong and right. At 7 their mental ability to investigate will be set, and at 14 it will burst forth in an explosion of intellectual curiosity and rejection of easy answers from their older peers and mentors.
Meanwhile we shall endure the drive towards the impossible and irrelevant goal of nett zero and , before it is rejected as hopeless and unnecessary, it may have some positive outcomes as humans search for a way in which we can live on this planet without polluting it irretrievably.
I assume we all want that?
Well done Paul!
I called in to a library yesterday and in the entrance was a large screen with notices pinned to it from ‘Climate Action Frodsham’, apparently also know as Frodsham Transition Initiative. The usual nonsense was on it including carbon footprints and two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions being linked to private households. I will be emailing them with my thoughts.
Sorry, a bit off topic, but I love the artwork in this report – who was the artist?
The reality doesn’t reflect The Consensus. My attempt to describe the reality is available at this link (if that’s allowed here);
https://share.internxt.com/d/sh/file/2d9ae131799ce890794e/85a562b986c9152d985e172f75ff4d253d40ffb67a9cfdc315b165b3f3c70670
Internext is a safe site. The link is to a pdf of 2,036 words in plain English accompanied by diagrams and links to references.
Last Autumn, Winter and Spring there wasn’t a single storm that was named by the Met Office, unless I blinked and missed a very short lived one. So much for the claims of an increasing number of severe weather events. When the Met office first started naming storms I said that it was a pointless waste of time, to which an alarmist colleague of mine said it was worthwhile because it would help people see the reality of climate change as the number of named storms increased. If he hadn’t sadly passed away since then I’d be laughing at him.