Science Shock: ‘Smoking Gun’ Evidence Emerges That the Met Office is Inventing Temperature Data

The UK Met Office has over 100 non-existent weather stations where it estimates temperature data using information from “well-correlated neighbouring sites”. However, it refuses to identify any of the sites used and bats away Freedom of Information (FOI) requests with the excuse that they are “vexatious” and not in the public interest. But today the Daily Sceptic can reveal recent work that shows how in the case of the fictitious site at Lowestoft there are no open weather stations for miles around, well-correlated or otherwise. Unless the Met Office can finally reveal its workings out, the only realistic conclusion to draw is that the data are invented. It is the ‘smoking gun’ that demands a full public explanation from the Met Office.

Temperature data at Lowestoft have been invented since 2010 when the station was closed. According to a Met Office public domain location temperature database, the nearest climate stations to Lowestoft are Hemsby (four miles away), Coltishall (25 miles), Scole (26 miles) and Morley St Botolph (30 miles). Given the distances from the coastal location of Lowestoft, these can hardly be considered well-correlated or neighbouring. The fact that every one of them is also closed might be considered another disqualifying feature, although, as we have seen with the Met Office, not necessarily so. What make Lowestoft particularly interesting is that it features as one of only 36 stations on the Met Office’s Historic Station database. Of even further interest is that it is still said to be open.

Concern about the temperature data produced by the Met Office has grown since the Daily Sceptic revealed in March 2024 that around 80% of existing weather stations are so poorly sited that they’re given ‘junk’ Class 4 and 5 status by CIMO, being subject to considerable internationally recognised recording errors. The Met Office is a UK government department and, like many state-run operations around the world, it is at the forefront of climate alarm and the political promotion of the fashionable Net Zero fantasy. Recently, the science writer Matt Ridley charged in the Telegraph that the Met Office had been ”embarrassingly duped by activists”. As its political role has grown, so it has been subjected to increasing scientific scrutiny. This led it to recently complain that the efforts of a small number of people to undermine the integrity of Met Office observations “is an attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world’s changing climate”.

Pomposity and arrogance are rarely absent when the Met Office seeks to deflect criticism. It seems unaware that science is only “robust” when it emerges intact after relentless and forensic examination. While the traditional scientific method is often effectively banned in the ‘settled’ world of climate science, its processes still apply if data are to be accepted as robust.

One of the small number of people to have the temerity to question the Met Office is citizen sleuth Ray Sanders, whose work we have highlighted on a number of occasions. His latest effort has produced the ‘smoking gun’ that is the Lowestoft case. His FOIs have squeezed the excuse from the Met Office that it cannot name the up to six well-correlated sites behind closed-site climate averages, because “it is not retained information”. Sanders is incredulous: “What not ever, not even for one day? Hands up anyone who believes that!” he writes.

Sanders defines correlation as a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things. As he points out, any site the Met claims is providing data that are “well-correlated” with data that Lowestoft would be providing, were it still open, would need to have been operating alongside Lowestoft up until 2010 when it closed for the correlation to have been established – and of course be providing current data. Since the Met Office will not play ball, he investigated other temperature sites that might fit the bill.

There are no stations to the east of Lowestoft, for the simply reason it is the most easterly point of the UK. Neither are there any in the UK directly north and south, notes Sanders. The nearest open site to Lowestoft is Lingwood Strumpshaw Hill, a Class 5 with possible errors up to 5°C. Comparing this woodland site 14 miles from the coastal location at Lowestoft with only 18 months’ temperature overlap is not realistic. Next up is Neatishead with no overlap and 20 miles distance. Tibenham Airfield is 24 miles away but only opened in 2015. Charsfield is a possibility with temperature overlap, but it is 29 miles inland on a fruit farm, hardly a place replicating coastal weather characteristics. In the end, Sanders found just two realistic distant sites – Class 4 Cromer at 35 miles and Class 2 Weybourne, 41 miles away. All of them of course push the Met Office’s own ‘neighbouring’ claim to the limit – if not well beyond.

At a very large push, there are just two distant weather stations from which data might be considered to provide some rough guide to temperature in the Lowestoft area. As Sanders concludes: “This seems incredibly unlikely to produce even a vaguely close relationship, let alone one the Met Office quotes to the second decimal degree in its climate averages pages.”

Ray Sanders has produced solid evidence that suggests the Met Office is inventing temperature data that it is using for political Net Zero purposes. Claiming his thorough, well documented investigations are “vexatious” will no longer wash. It must reply with realistic explanations and evidence of its own to retain public trust in its work.

These are the charges that Sanders makes:

1. The Met Office cannot substantiate any reasonable “correlation” of those operational sites that are actually used because there are almost certainly none. Any station’s data that are being used are not comparable and will artificially distort readings.
2. The Met Office is actually using data that have already been fabricated to create averages for those closed sites which it then expands on. Averages of averages of averages almost ad infinitum.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.