September Heatwaves
By Paul Homewood
It’s certainly been exceptionally hot for the last few days, but even with thermometers next to airport runways, main roads and in the middle of London, the highest temperature the Met Office could come up with was 33.2C (91.8F) at Kew.
But it was in fact much hotter in September 1906:
https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/SO_47174b54-8030-4548-97ce-a2ff84349c7d/
The reading of 96F at Bawtry, S Yorks is still officially the highest September temperature in Britain.
The widespread extent of the intense heat was in itself remarkable, stretching from the Scottish Highlands, through Yorkshire and the Midlands, and down to the South East. In contrast, temperatures last week did not appear to get above the mid 80s at most for much of the country. This was certainly the case in Rutland, where I was cycling.
Probably even more remarkable still were the three September heatwaves in 1911, the culmination of an exceptionally hot summer.
Mean temperatures in July/August were a full 2C higher in 1911 than this year. And as the chart below shows, daily maximums were consistently higher then , other than that short spell in June.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
I have absolutely no doubt that in due course the Met Office will highlight this year’s heatwaves in June and this month, and say they are evidence of climate change.
I somewhat doubt they will even mention the summer of 1911, much less explain how it could happen in the absence of climate change!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The Met office are focussing on ‘tropical nights’ as supposedly evidence of climate change. They think that an attribution study ‘proving’ that 3 consecutive tropical nights in July 2022 was made much more likely by climate change can simply be extended to September 2023 to infer the same! I’m not even sure that there have been three consecutive minimum night time temperatures of 20C or above recorded during this current very warm period. Perhaps somebody can confirm whether or not that happened.
I keep asking the question: is it possible that the Earth itself is warming on its core? This will heat the sea from the bottom and that will rise and melt the ice from underneath, as appears to be happening.
Also the cord warming may cause increased seismic activity like volcanoes and earthquakes which seems to be happening.
Is this latter true?
If the core is warming that no doubt has happened often and it will cool again. Not much to do with greenhouse effect.
There is nothing much to do with the greenhouse effect anyway except for a bunch of people paid to claim (without empirical data support) that it is a). significant and b). caused by man. Nice thought regarding internal heat, how much it varies, and what happens when it does. Down at 4km or so in the North Sea for example temperatures are usually above 120degC and sometimes much higher in exceptional situations which creates problems for downhole logging tools.
Malcolm, one of the facts that I like to quote is that the boundary between the Earth’s inner and outer cores (radius c1,200km) is believed to have a temperature of c5,000C – a broadly (very) similar temperature to the surface of the Sun, which of course provides the primary heating to our atmosphere. We thus do have a tremendous heat source under our feet and it is tempting to wonder just how significant that could be in the occasional warming that our Troposphere is subjected to.
In reality, however, this heat is extremely well insulated from the Earth’s surface and I for one have never read that the core is heating up. Having said that, there is no question that tectonic activity and volcanism can release heat from within the Earth but, as yet, nobody has established whether that heat so derived could ever be enough to drive global atmospheric temperature change on anything but a very short-term and very limited basis. The IPCC certainly don’t think so – it thinks it’s an irrelevance. I am not quite so sure and I am aware, for instance that some geologists have postulated that ENSO cycles may result from Pacific tectonism. All very interesting stuff if you like this kind of thing but, sadly, right now we just don’t know the answers.
The release of particulates, and possibly water vapour from major volcanoes certainly can drive global temperature changes for a year or two but that is a different topic from looking at the heat per se.
Piers Corbyn believes that the solar wind causes earthquakes where a high speed windstream hits the earth and there is certainly something in this as there is a correlation between a high speed wind and an earthquake.
Meanwhile, volcanic eruptions increase during the periods of solar minimum such as we have now.
You might think that researchers would be all over this but of course to admit that the sun has a powerful effect on our planet could make people ask awkward questions…..
Gerry, we are not in a solar minimum right now. We are climbing up towards the maximum of Cycle 25, which is stronger than the low Cycle 24. See https://www.solarham.net/progression.htm for details.
Your link has no detail and is of no use as it does not show that we are in a period of low solar activity and does not prove your claim of Cycle 25 is higher than Cycle 24.
The fanatical “i” has an article about these warm days with the usual “climate b/s” clause and a comment by the Met office’s “principal fellow for climate extremes” Paul Davies that these events will increase in frequency as our climate warms. They also use unprecedented with gay abandon. Propaganda rules!
And there was me thinking that ‘the weather determines the climate’ rather than the other way round.
Even the IPCC know………….
……””The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
IPCC Third Assessment Report 2001
If the Met Office had made such a prediction after the most recent really hot summer in the UK, i.e. 1976 they would be looking pretty silly!
Note also that though we broke the September record for consecutive days over 30C during the last week the previous record of 3 days occured in 1898, 1906, 1911 (discussed here) and 2016, Pretty hot obviously at end 19thC early 20thC
Data from temperature recording in deep mineshafts should settle this one. It would seem quite likely that the temperature generated by the fusion reaction could oscillate.
I think you mean fission, not fusion in the earth’s core/mantle
As an ex-pilot I still trawl the charts looking at jet streams etc. Of particular note this year was the height of the tropical tropopause. It peaked at 58000ft before dropping to 50000ft and now settling about 53000ft. The limits and vertical movements correlated to the very hot Med and US temperatures and shift from ‘normal’ jet streams to meridional ones, with stationary Rossby waves exacerbating the heatwaves. My question is – as the tropical tropopause descends could the Hadley cells return phase be moved further north, resulting in the subtropical high pressure areas collocating with the descending air? So Saharan weather blankets the Northern shores of the Med; and our cold and wet summer a consequence of the stationary Rossby waves?
For me the key phrase from there above “cuttings” is “shade maxima”- now, whatever happened to that very precise phrase and why is it not being used to describe temperature readings in the 21st century – hang on, isn’t the Coningsby reading taken between two strips of concrete on an RAF base which houses fast jets taking off on full reheat?
it was in fact much hotter in September 1906
Have the temperature adjusters slipped up somehow? 😎
In 1911 the UK annual record temperature was set almost simultaneously At Raunds (Northants) and Canterbury (Kent) and not broken (allegedly) until 1990. There currently are somewhat oddly no weather stations in either location now so I used the digital archives to ascertain where the Canterbury one was located. They helpfully give co-ordinates on the archived records as 51°24N 1°04’54E. To my surprise it was located very close to where I used to live in an area I know very well indeed from walking by where it was almost daily. The site to this day is actually quite rural (bowls club) and UHI would not be an issue.
I also checked the Raunds location (52°20N 0°32E) and again it is not UHI compromised to this day.
Fast forward to modern times and what quality are those recording breaking sites of the modern era.
2022 RAF Coningsby (by taxiway simultaneous to take off?landings of flight of Typhoon jets)
2019 Royal Botanic Gardens Cambridge 2019 from a site removed from CET in 1931 for recognised UHI,
2003 Brogdale Farm, Faversham 2003 a site which the Royal Meteorological Society inspectione reported was most likely tampered with by “persons unknown” {* Those “guilty” of said rascality were well known locally, I lived very close by at the time – and no it wasn’t me! }
1990 Cheltenham but of course it wasn’t in Cheltenham it was by the taxiway at
Gloucester Airport.
So it is clearly very difficult from the current batch of dodgy figures the Met Office tries to hawk around as data these days to conclude whether any records really have been broken or not. My gut feel is that if there had been jet aircraft and twice the population figure back in 1911, the current Met Office shysters could have rustled up at least 42°C somewhere.
I have been in lechlade,Cambridge and now beccles in Suffolk for last six days. Using my accurate thermometer I can confirm it has been uncomfortably hot at between 30 and 33c until today at 27c. Night’s have been above 20c mostly but with one cool 14c night
Which for once makes East Anglia as warm as south-east Burgundy! The figures are broadly similar but our overnights have been upper teens rather than low 20s. (Down here it’s due to break tomorrow afternoon.)
There is no reason not to accept that the current warmer (than the Little Ice Age) weather patterns are likely to throw up higher temperatures especially when they have the backing of an (allegedly strong) El Niño plus this mysterious Hunga-Tonga volcano which appears to be set on adding a degree or two over the next couple of years.
But that should be as far as it goes. As someone commented earlier, the only person ever to experience real climate change was Noah!
By 2030 we are quite likely to be heading down again and probably caught “looking the wrong way”. And that could really be painful!
And this was before airports were invented!
Interesting thing about this heatwave is that it puts the Central England Temperature (CET) hottest day in September, for the first time since 1954. But between 1878 and 1954, a similar span of time, there were 6 years when the hottest day was in September, namely
yyyy m dd temp
1880 9 4 27.4
1891 9 10 25.8
1898 9 17 27.1
1906 9 1 31.2
1919 9 11 27.2
1954 9 1 26.6
Perhaps just a curiosity.