Rising Temperatures, Sunshine Hours & The Clean Air Acts
By Paul Homewood
According to the Met Office, UK mean temperatures have been on the rise since about 1980. But during the exact same period sunshine hours have also been steadily rising:
It does not take a genius to work out there might just be a connection here!
And in a paper they published in 2006, the Met Office admitted there was not just a connection, but temperatures and sunshine were in fact strongly correlated.
The paper, Climate Memorandum No 21, was an analysis of all climate trends. It has since disappeared from the Met Office website, but is fortunately still saved on Wayback:
This is the key chart:
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 sun = less rain).
Broadly we can see that there are strong positive correlations in spring and autumn, both in max and mins. In summer, there is a positive correlation for max temperatures, but little correlation either way with mins.
In winter there is a very weak negative correlation, with virtually none at all in England.
Overall, the data tells us that more sunshine leads to higher average temperatures annually. This is confirmed by the Report:
It goes on to speculate that the increased sunshine could be linked to reduced air pollution:
Whether this is the case, or whether it is a meteorological phenomenon, it would seem that at least part of the rise in temperatures in recent decades is the result of more sunshine, and not GHGs. (It is worth bearing in mind that global cooling in the 1960s and 70s was widely blamed on air pollution.)
The Met Office have hidden this inconvenient report away, and never refer to its findings and implications.
It is time they came clean, updated its analysis and published the results.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Indeed.
Mainly due to scrubbers reducing sulphur-dioxide from power stations, global dimming reduced from the mid 80s onwards.
This is the problem with meddling in climate. If they had only kept our dirty emissions, there would have been no warming… ;-) ;-) ;-)
Ralph
“It has since disappeared from the Met Office website …”
The evidence is in the cover up.
Actually, I think (European) warming since the 80s has more to do with the AMO than CO2. And the AMO is about to go back into cold-mode.
Note the PDO has already gone into cold-mode, and China just had their coldest winter on record.
Ralph
Did you see OSLO broke a 183 year old cold record in January, with many shorter (century) all time records been broken elsewhere in Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Of course it was reported by the impartial BBC…..errrrr
I understand the vagaries of “weather” especially in a maritime setting however, this year on the South West coast of Norway has been not only exceptionally cold but also for a prolonged period of time. We had a similar event 3 or 4 years ago. Normally because of the setting, temperatures are in the -2/+2 range. Autumn started in August last year after a very late Spring. In December and January we had weeks below freezing and in January an extended period of three weeks where we got down to -11. The sea in Sandnes froze and people were skating on the ice. Funny thing. For the whole of that three week period my iphone gave a higher than actual temperature when showing the range for that day and also consistently showed the next seven data as being substantially above zero. Indeed the actual temperature was shown as being often 5 or more degrees colder than the range they said would occur that very day! That suggests their information comes from at least two sources. I only started making screen grabs when I got annoyed. You can get it wrong for one or two days but not continuously for three weeks showing the same thing which is under reporting the actual cold temperatures. I have tried to find where their weather info comes from but so far have not been successful. I will post this as an interesting “observation” only wondering how it can be to be so wrong but consistently wrong the same way for three weeks when reporting “actual” and “projected”.
I’ve seen this before and shudder at the prospect. I lived through the 50s and 60s winters and they were not fun. The benign winters we experience now could only be dreamed of back then.
I would have thought that the effects of clean air acts was less obvious than stated and it would refer only to larger urban areas.
Interesting the analysis covers only 1961 to 2004 yet they say they have data since 1921 and we must suppose they have it up to last month. They have analysed 45 years but they probably have over 100 years data available.
Sulfur free petrol and diesel in around 2000. If reduced SO2 is one cause then there should have been a further improvement this century?
If it becomes sunnier then it would be expected to be warmer than when it is cloudy (depending on season) . The sun would also impact on our ocean temperatures. I don’t know if there are reliable sea temperatures for the British isles covering the same period.
Sun also equates to clearer skies which might reasonably be reflected with cooler nights but that could be offset by urbanisation.
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were stories about a new ice age. We are all goint to freeze and by the way we are running out of oil.
My father was a farmer. he had seen his fair share of bad winders and bad summers. His answer to the fear stories was “so long as that light bulb up in the sky keeps burning, all will be OK”.
He had left school at 14 but it seems to me he was right then and he is right now.
And cleaner bunker fuel for shipping was put forward as one of the reasons for the warm spell last year. But just try getting a greenie billionaire to fund some research into the role of clearer skies on temperature – remember the temperature rise when the planes stopped in September 2011.
I wonder what effect the decline in industrial output from western European and North American countries has had on overhead air quality. Also what is the effect on global weather patterns of the subsequent increase in industrial output over China and India? One would think that the associated smog and pollution has effectively moved south-eastwards over the last few decades. Surely this must have some effect on the world’s climate?
Since the ” Clean Air Acts ” in the 60s and 70s , air pollution in the UK has reduced by about 75% .
A lot of that must come from industrial use .
Despite all of the propaganda , very little comes from road vehicles as the lockdown had very little effect .https://airqualitynews.com/cars-freight-transport/pm2-5-pollution-did-not-decline-during-lockdown-in-scotland/
So almost certainly the clearer skies have increased the amount of sunshine getting to the ground .
But the Green lies will still claim Global Warming .
“…temperatures and sunshine were in fact strongly correlated.“(MO)
Well, knock me down wiv a fevver!!!
I was suprised as well.All these years🙄.
I was always struggling to work out why cloudy days were colder than those with bright sunshine. And why cloudy nights seemed to be warmer as well.
Clever Trevor.
In other news, we are assured that the current cold weather in Canada is weather and not climate. While technically true, it is not beyond possibility that it indicates the start of a cooling trend.
It is on the Met Office website, maybe not linked anymore:
A spatial analysis of trends in the UK climate since 1914 using gridded datasets (metoffice.gov.uk)
So what your saying is…………………………….
You’re, apologies.
On a purely practical. outdoor fruit & veg crop growth & yield basis. no growing season since has ever excelled 1998 here in S Devon.
Separately, in response to a NALOPKT item re ‘clean air’, circa 1998/9. I have been using Sulphur dust as a soil additive since then. The beneficial results have been most noticeable on garlic, tomatoes & plums (yield & flavour). About 0.5 oz. per plant per year (garlic & tomatoes) and 2-3 oz. per plum tree per year with almost no reduction in soil pH.
Typo – the NALOPKN ‘clean air’ article was circa 2018/9, not 1998/9.
‘It goes on to speculate that the increased sunshine could be linked to reduced air pollution’
Let’s go on to speculate it could be linked to reduced cloud cover. Maybe the Met Office has some data on this somewhere …
Figure 1a in this 2014 Clive Best post shows a good correlation between global average cloud cover and temperature from 1983: https://clivebest.com/blog/?p=5694.
From the highlighted text” ”<em>Most of the increase has taken place since the late 1960’s.</em>” {sic: unnecessary comma}]
The cleaning of the air was not just something done in the UK, see:1948 Donora smog**
The event is often credited for helping to trigger the clean-air movement in the United States, whose crowning achievement was the Clean Air Act of 1963,
**{U. S. Steel, the company in that story, is being bought by Nippon Steel, Japan}
Formatting and such on this and other sites is (sometimes) enough to drive one to drink. 🙂
https://climate.copernicus.eu/esotc/2022/clouds-and-sunshine-duration
I have long been interested in the effects of increasingly clean air. When I was a boy we lived high up on a south facing hill with an industrial town in the valley below. The sky was often hazy from the smoke of mill chimneys plus domestic smoke in winter. On warm summer days the weekday sky was opaque but often Sundays with the mills idle the sky would be blue. Strong summer sunshine has increased since the mills have gone – most smokestacks had stopped belching by the late 1970s. Coupled with the emergence from the cool 1960s-70s increased strong sunshine certainly seems to have raised summer maxima, and yet the opposite does not seem to be the case for winter where one would expect clearer skies to lead to colder minima. My own conclusion is that in industrial areas cleaner air in summer has to some extent led to more strong sunlight and therefore higher temperatures, but this is only a small aprt of a general (and beneficient) warming since 1989.
Re : Met Office :
Googling to see what atmospheric CO2 concentration the IPCC CAGW activists believed would cause the planet’s temperature to reach 1.5 degrees C above the pre Industrial Revolution level I came across :
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/2018/how-much-co2-at-1.5c-and-2c
where the Met Office write :
“At 1.5 °C or 2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere will be higher than it is today, with impacts on land and marine ecosystems, and on food production.
Based on the TCR estimated from observational constraints in IPCC AR5, this paper estimates median CO2 concentrations at 1.5 and 2 °C of 507 ppm and 618 ppm, respectively.”
Is this not the wrong way round? Surely, the IPCC’s CAGW theory should be that increasing CO2 concentration from anthropogenic emissions determines the temperature, not the temperature determining the CO2 concentration?
And won’t higher CO2 levels increase green the planet and increase food production?! Or is this bad for the planet?
From the wording, I’ll guess the MET office was looking at the UN’s Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) material.
Representative Concentration Pathway – Wikipedia
Not that it matters. Currently, atmospheric CO2 is at 422 ppm. In 40 years it will be about 507 and in 100 years about 618; or maybe not. Green plants will respond. The temperature won’t change as much as it does if one goes from the top of a large building to the street level. Or the temperature may go down. That would be the most interesting. Think of the weeping and gnashing of teeth if 2 degrees down happens!
“Think of the weeping and gnashing of teeth if 2 degrees down happens!”
Ha! Hold my brain; be still my beating Heart.”
But no! Assuming the public does not first become terminally bored with the whole matter, I say, with full seriousness, that a decline would be explained as being a deliberate punishment of us by Gaia for warming her up.
Paul, your quote from the Met Office report sent me to my reference books once again; this time to Roy Spencer’s, “The Great Global Warming Blunder” [Ref. 1].
Spencer writes at page vii, “… the central thesis of the book: that natural cloud variations cause temperature variations, which give the illusion that the climate system is very sensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
Spencer quantifies the effect at page 107, “It would take natural variations of little more than 1 percent in global average cloud cover to explain most of the climate change seen in the last 2,000 years …”
At page 123 Spencer writes, “What I have demonstrated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is just scratching the surface of naturally induced climate change. What if other modes of natural climate variability – such as El Nino, La Nina, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the Arctic Oscillation (AO) – also contribute to changes in global average cloudiness? … The IPCC’s assumption that such small natural variations in global cloudiness do not occur is, in my view, arbitrary and scientifically irresponsible.”
Reference
Regards, John.
I keep thinking about this and the ban on high sulfur bunker fuel that went into effect in March of 2020. The sulfur emissions led to a lot of clouds over the oceans trailing those ships. I also think of this in relation La Niña El Niño cycles where at least one oceanographer described La Niña as solar absorption phase in the pacific and El Niño as the heat release phase. There was a triple La Niña to heat the oceans before the current El Niño. Was the ban on bunker fuel part the cause for the “hottest year ever”?
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/aqua/nasa-study-finds-evidence-that-fuel-regulation-reduced-air-pollution-from-shipping/
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