The Met Office is Gaslighting Us With its Claim that Our Damp and Chilly May Was “Warmest on Record”-Ben Pile
By Paul Homewood
A good piece by Ben Pile.
Regardless of the accuracy or otherwise of the Met Office figures, Ben points out that the supposed warming we have been seeing in recent years has little to do with high temperature extremes. Instead it has more to do with the relative of abnormally cold weather and milder nights.
As he points out, why should this be a climate crisis?
Weatherwise, it has been a rubbish May. And it has been an abysmal spring. It has been cold and wet. And everyone knows it. But according to the Meteorological Office, the U.K. has just experienced its hottest ever May, and its hottest ever spring. As news reports and the Met Office’s own press release have correctly indicated, this “may come as a surprise” to many people who actually live here (rather than on the planet that the Met Office’s scientists inhabit). To those people, many of whom had their heating on for a good part of the month, the Met Office’s statement, as well as the “akshully…” news reports that claim to shed light on the difference between perception and reality, look like actual gaslighting. Even if the claim is true, which remains to be seen, what it reveals is the inadequacy of temperature as a metric on which U.K. climate and energy policy rests.
Read the full story here
Ben’s summing up is very telling:
“I was surprised to discover that data from the weather stations that are used in the Met Office’s analysis are not available to the public at higher than monthly resolution.
That’s a problem because in order to build an estimate of how useful minimum and maximum temperature data are, even in one location, never mind across an entire country, it would need to be compared to hourly data at a minimum. But not even daily data are available.
You might have thought that scientists and institutions that are so keen to tell us that their metric is so significant would be just as keen to make all of that data available to us. But you would be mistaken. The data is jealously guarded. It’s not for public consumption. We are supposed to take the good faith of institutional science for granted and are neither welcome nor even permitted to check for ourselves. ‘Follow the science’, means ‘obey’, not ‘try to understand’. And that’s what makes me – and, I hope, you – a sceptic.”
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I’m not a farmer but I live in a farming community and they tell me that soil temperature is 3 or 4 weeks behind what they’d expect
It is that cold at the moment that even the weeds are not growing!
WE had the central heating off for a few days in May but currently have it on well into June.
Which doubtless will be reported as another record.
Anyway what is wrong with warmer weather in Britain? About ten years ago I bought a room air conditioner. It has had 3 or 4 days cumulative use in a decade.
The MMet Office is largely funded by our taxes. They do seem to make it as hard as possible to find any data. . Several other Met offices can provide this for their countries.
There’s still a long way to go as far as warming is concerned.
During the mid-late Eocene epoch, 44-34 million years ago, large parts of Antarctica were ice-free, creating room for river systems now long frozen. Sediments from the Amundsen Sea came all the way from the mountain range that spans the continent, revealing there was no inland sea in between to capture them.
The world was a hotter place in general 40 million years ago, but the difference was most stark in Antarctica
https://www.iflscience.com/a-giant-ancient-river-system-revealed-beneath-antarcticas-ice-74558
I have a suspicion the Met Office has slowly been curtailing availability of historical data for a long time. They are also making it more difficult – only able to download individual stations by clicking online, not bulk sets of data. They also make the formats awkward, eg with * appearing as part of numbers, not as a separate flag in its own column to indicate provisional
Also I have noticed there seems to be different station sets depending on where you go on their website(s).
I just googled:
newton rigg precipitation data
and I get back the following Met Office page:
metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/stationdata/newtonriggdata.txt
So what’s the problem you may ask? The problem is I have a copy of Newton Rigg precipitation monthly data going back to 1891, whereas the current available download only starts in 1961…70 years of data missing. The numbers are no the same but they do correlate in the overlap period.
Trends 1891-1999? Downwards
Trends in the 1891 set but truncated after 1961-1999? No Trend to 1999
Trends in the current download from 1961-2023? Strong positive
Trends in the current download from 1961 to 1999? Positive
Have you tried the MIDAS database? Search for Met Office MIDAS, anyone can register for access, they ask questions about institution, but they let me in without one (a few years ago). They have hourly and daily data, but in an unfriendly format, for example daily data comes in separate yearly chunks, tedious to obtain long records.
Just discovered the zip file download option, some relatively simple file reading software should allow complete records to be obtained automatically from an unziped folder of yearly files.
Hi TS if you look at that data you linked to, check out all the temperature figures from April 2021 and you will see that every figure is asterisked. That means it is an “Estimate” and NOT real data i.e. the figures have been made up!
Although Newton Rigg was previously CIMO assessed as Class 4 (inaccurate to 2 degrees) if you check this list of the Met Office you will see it no longer appears.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-synoptic-and-climate-stations
Newton Rigg appears to have been closed down as a reporting site and any ongoing figures are just computer generated. I raised this point yesterday that Lowestoft reports figures despite closing 14 years ago – I have this confirmed by email from the Met Office and copied the email to Paul. There are several similar closed down stations continuing to report “data”.
What do you now make of that?
Is this the infamous ‘gridding’ at work where data from somewhere else is used? In Australia this has been shown to be from hundreds of miles away.
Just be content to understand the Met Office has been captured by the AGW mob, therefore it will do whatever it needs to, to align with the narrative, like Jim Dale, because there’s lots of money to be made currently by enforcing the globalist socialism led narrative – it’s incapable now of presenting unbiased, accurate, empirical science based data, once you accept that, the best we can do is offer rebuttals and the truth, reality will do the rest
I’ve just received an email today from Octopus Energy. I’m not paying enough to build up a healthy balance before winter so they suggest £50 per month extra. I’m electric only, have a heat pump and haven’t changed the heating settings. Its been unusually cold so forgive me for suggesting the Met Office have an agenda to support. My heating bill doesn’t lie, perhaps the Met Office should clarify their statement.
You should ask them to pay interest on the cash balance. Why should they get a free loan from you?
Hmm…better not try that with me or they will find themselves one customer less as an Octopus customer only due to Shell Energy selling up.
The problem of averages and the stupidity of using the mean of max-min for “hottest ever” claims. It simply does not measure the overall temperature of a period in any meaningful way. I’m also curious how they adjust for the Leap Year?
How is the United Nations coordinating this via the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)? It seems more than a coincidence that MET Éireann (Republic of Ireland weather service) have in recent years put out press releases with the same timing as other meteorological agencies using the same template? I know they work closely with the the UK MET office, however, other agencies put out the same type format information on the same time lines. This requires coordination – who is the coordinator?
How weird is it that I can look up data from over hundred years ago by day free of charge but not for ten years ago!
https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/IO_abc144ef-5c6f-484a-9f17-aea7995b70a7/
Like all our other institutions (parliament, judiciary, law enforcement, health, media, teaching) the Met Office have very little credibility.
They’re not helping themselves by spouting utter nonsense about ‘warmest month’ when almost everyone living in the UK knows it’s a lie.
I was a bit skeptical about the claims of record May heat, Aberdeen had a few warm days but nothing exceptional. Then I checked Wunderground.com and indeed some parts of Scotland did have exceptional warmth, though not NE Scotland. We don’t experience “average” temperatures we experience “weather”, I can assure you that on one occasion I nearly froze to death during this “record breaking” Spring, a degree or so of warming cycling into horizontal freezing rain isn’t going to stave off hypothermia much.
Data from the Met Office should be marked:
We issue imaginary data from imaginary weather stations.
and…
We warrant that our temperature data is accurate to within plus/minus 5’C
Reefer Madness hysteria relies on data no less imaginary. The problem begins when fraud gets hold of the deadly violence of law. For every initiation of force there is unequal yet apposite reprisal force. For 44 years I have sought to defuse BOTH hysterical Faiths. But if you think freezing in the dark is worth bullying girls, hippies and brown people, experiencing it will soon disabuse you of that notion.