Met Office Shock: More Non-Existent UK Weather Stations Discovered Reporting Invented Data

Last month the average maximum temperature at Newton Rigg was 11.5°C, the lowest was 3°C, while 23mm of rain fell. Newton Rigg is near Penrith in  Cumbria and in its historic database the UK Met Office claims it is an open site and is one of its 380 UK wide temperature measuring stations. This claim is also made in two Met Office lists of site class classification obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in 2023 and 2024. All of which is rather strange. Newton Rigg closed in 2021 and all the data being published as climate averages are estimated, i.e., invented. The historic database contains 37 stations and seven of the total, no less than 19%, are closed or do not exist. Invented figures are also being supplied for Lowestoft, Cwmystwyth, Nairn Druim, Eastbourne, Oxford and Paisley.

The Met Office claims that monthly data are available for a selection of long-running historic stations and series typically range from 50 to more than 100 years in length. Sunshine data are noted to use a Kipp and Zonen sensor in some sites, while all the others have data recorded by a Campbell-Stokes recorder. All the others, the Met Office omitted to make clear, except those where the figures have been invented for the non-existent stations.

Of course as regular readers well know, the UK Met Office has form as long as its arm when it comes to making up temperature data. In a separate public database it was recently found that the state meteorologist was making up 30-year average temperatures from 103 non-existent stations. The Met Office referenced the station names and provided single location coordinates for the imaginary sites including one improbably based next to the water on Dover Beach. Massive social media publicity led to a rapid change, with individual coordinates being removed and the database being renamed to suggest the information came from a wider location.

A subsequent inept ‘fact check’ from Science Feedback largely written by the Met Office found it “misleading” to suggest that the data were “fabricated”. Rather they were estimated using “well-correlated neighbouring stations”. Alas for this explanation, it was subsequently revealed that the location of Norwich in this dataset uses supposedly well-correlated information from five stations that do not exist. The Met Office claims its estimates use a scientific method that is published in peer-reviewed literature.

Of course at this stage in our corresponding we must give our regular shout out to citizen super-sleuth Ray Sanders. Writing on Tallbloke’s Talkshop, Sanders is undertaking a forensic investigation of the Met Office’s weather data gathering operations. In his recent investigation into the Newton Rigg site he provides the following photographic evidence of its closure. First the site in April 2021, based in the grounds of a college campus. The measuring device is clearly visible in the near centre of the picture.

The same site in July 2022 confirms the closure, despite the Met Office still claiming on its historic database that the site is still open.

And here according to Sanders is the screen shot take from the current historic database that shows the Met Office is still claiming with an orange tag that Newton Rigg is open.

Sanders is withering in his concluding criticism:

The Met Office is operating in an extremely unscientific and even incompetent manner. Analysis of such incomplete and inaccurate, even invented numbers is a futile exercise. That such non-data are being statistically tortured to the Nth degree by alleged peer-review scientific processes is frankly a bad joke and completely unacceptable.

The Daily Sceptic had noted on a number of occasions that the Met Office has only itself to blame for a tidal wave of bad publicity that has arisen over its obviously defective weather measuring network. The network across the UK was never intended to provide the precision that is being claimed, but internal activists have weaponised the data to invoke climate panic in the interest of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Despite nearly 80% of its weather stations being so badly placed they have internationally recognised ‘uncertainties’ between 2-5°C, political capital is made by claiming accuracy to within one hundredth of a degree centigrade.

Possibly the Met Office feels protected from criticism since both mainstream media and mainstream politics have avoided the story like the plague, fearful, of course, that it could open a pandora’s box on the temperature inputs that back the agreed Net Zero narrative. But the dam might be starting to burst with the Scottish Daily Express running a story last January noting that “most of Scotland’s Met Office stations can be wrong by two to five degrees”. The newspaper did its own FOI request and found that only three out of 95 local stations were rated at the highest pristine standard by the World Meteorological Organisation.

Needless to say, there are no holds barred on uncensored social media, a far more important communicating vehicle these days than fast-fading, narrative-driven legacy operations. Recently, the Met Office posted some of its own research on X that claimed the wildfires that broke out during a brief UK 2022 heatwave were made “at least six times” more likely due to human-caused climate change. Complete unprovable pseudoscience attribution twaddle, some would argue, and this view was seemingly shared in many of the 200 plus responses.

“Give it a rest”

“Utter ballcocks. It was human induced arson. You really are the stupidest scientists.”

“Was this ‘research’ carried out using fiddled figures produced by stations which don’t exist.”

“Is that real data. Or more stuff from imaginary weather stations?”

“It’s your job to forecast the weather, not to broadcast propaganda.”

Recently, the Eighth Fake News Awards went viral on social media. The professionally-produced film pulled no punches in awarding one of its unwelcome gongs to the Met Office for “literally making up 103 fake temperature sites reporting 30-year averages from those non-existent sites”. It was said to be a massive ongoing scheme to control the future by controlling the past. The award was said to be deserved due to the Met Office’s “most shameless attempt at lying to the public in a field overwhelmed with people shamelessly lying to the public”.

The Met Office has a real problem in attracting this level of vociferous criticism, justified or not, since it distracts from a great deal of admirable day-to-day scientific meteorology. But it shows what can happen to public trust when an increasingly controversial political agenda disrupts the usual workings of the scientific process.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.