EXCLUSIVE: New Freedom of Information Revelation Casts Further Doubt on UK Met Office Claims of ‘Hottest Evah’ Temperatures

Following a Freedom of Information request, the UK Met Office has confirmed that it calculates the daily average temperature at each of its 403 weather stations by dividing the highest and lowest recordings by two. A small technical point of interest only to meteorologists, it might be thought. In fact, this disclosure, which has never been made clear across Met Office published sources, is the ‘smoking gun’ that calls into question all the claims of ‘hottest evahs’ that the state meteorologist uses to promote the political interests of the Net Zero fantasy. It might even stop the constant demotion of the glorious summer of 1976 in the record league table, pushed down to a lowly sixth place by the more dubious claims of recent summer scorchers.

This is why our exclusive revelation is so important. Over the last 30 years, the Met Office has moved to recording temperature remotely using automatic electronic devices. These are more accurate than the manual glass bulb thermometers of old that supplied a maximum and minimum temperature over a 24-hour period. For their part, the electronic devices can record temperature every few seconds to within five decimal points. But as the Daily Sceptic has disclosed over the last year, almost 80% of the stations in the Met Office network are poorly sited with unnatural heat influences raging through the recordings. In addition, Dr Eric Huxter has recently shown that heat spikes are a feature of many ‘extreme’ claims. Looking at the daily ‘extremes’ declared over the month of last May, he calculated that on average about 0.89°C was added to the maximum temperature by these temporary blips – temporary blips that would never have been picked up by slow-reacting glass bulb devices. Taken across the entire network, this must have a considerable effect by artificially inflating the daily, monthly, seasonal and annual averages. Last summer was said to be the hottest ever recorded at 16.1°C, but was it really any warmer than 1976 with an old-style average of 15.7°C?

The planet has warmed over the last 50 years, nobody denies that. Earth is in an interglacial and also bouncing back from a ‘mini’ ice age over the last 200 years. A rise of around 1°C over that latter timescale is not unusual, and has been observed many times in the paleoclimatic past. But over the last 40 years, the rises have been exaggerated and catastrophised by alarmists. They seek political power by demonising the trace gas carbon dioxide in order to seize control of the economic commanding heights afforded by the simple expedient of banning hydrocarbon use. The science writer Matt Ridley feels the Met Office has been “embarrassingly duped by activists”. Meanwhile, the evidence of temperature exaggeration gets more conclusive by the day. Poor quality data that often differ significantly from natural ambient air temperatures is being used to produce boosted averages that are compiled using simple 19th century statistical techniques.

Case in point. For electronic devices, the World Meteorological Organisation recommends compiling individual average temperatures at any point between one to ten minutes. The Met Office uses the lowest one-minute recommendation. This guarantees that any unnatural heat spike will be captured and integrated into the longer-term record if it should turn out to be the maximum produced over the 24-hour period. The Met Office must know that its network is prone to substantial heat spikes and must be aware that a longer averaging period would at least moderate these important recordings.

Minute records are not freely available on Met Office sites, but the Daily Sceptic can reveal the 60-second measurements either side of the 40.3°C national ‘record’ declared on July 19th, 2022 at RAF Coningsby. Over just three minutes, the temperature both rose and fell by 0.6°C and a subsequent FOI request indicated the presence of landing Typhoon jets.

At 15.12 the high of 40.3°C was declared and subsequently publicised across mainstream media. But if an average temperature across five minutes is calculated, this falls to 39.96°C, while at the 10 mark there is a further decline to 39.8°C. Nobody is disputing that the day was hot, possibly the hottest in the 150-year record – it just wasn’t as hot as the Met Office indicated when it promoted a “milestone in our climate history”. But more importantly, the lower 10-minute average, which hopefully took away some of the effect of hot gases that might have been swirling around the runway, reduced the average temperature by 0.5°C. This amount matters when similar heat-spiked data are loaded into the longer-term record. Subsequently, the country data is used to calculate a global temperature in databases such as the Met Office’s own HadCRUT. The published global warming figure, compiled from similarly country-corrupted data elsewhere, leads to the not uncommon cry from alarmists that every tenth of a degree matters on the road to climate Armageddon.

In his seminal work, Dr Eric Huxter opened a window on the possible extent to which 60-second recordings were collecting large numbers of unnatural heat spikes. On May 1st this year, the Met Office claimed that its station at Kew Gardens recorded a temperature of 29.3°C at 2.59pm. This was said to be the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK on May Day. But the temperature was an obvious outlier, since it was a massive 2.6°C higher than that seen at 2pm and no less than 0.76°C above the figure recorded a minute later at 3pm. Temperatures can move around from minute to minute, generally in the 0.1°C–0.3°C range. The Kew uplift was the highest observed, although ‘record’ favourite Heathrow was not far behind on numerous highlighted occasions, as the information below covering April 26th to May 30th shows.

The overall average spike of 0.87°C calls into question the constant ‘hottest evah’ claims of the Met Office. The average of the top 20 sites, including five appearances of Heathrow Airport, is a massive 1.32°C. Met Office Chief Scientist Professor Stephen Belcher calls for Net Zero to “stabilise the climate”, and promotes his political cause by claiming that between 2014–2023, the number of days recording 28°C in the UK had doubled, while those over 30°C had tripled compared to 1961–1990. Trusted media messenger Justin Rowlatt of the BBC adds that climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of “extreme” high temperatures in the UK. There has been a 40% increase in “pleasant days”, defined as around 20°C, he notes. Presumably just before going for a lengthy lie down in a cool dark place, he added: “These changes may sound positive, but the UK’s shifting climate represents a dangerous upheaval for our ecosystems as well as our infrastructure.”

Around the world, Net Zero is either dying or being ignored and ‘climate change’ is slipping down the public agenda. In Trump’s America, the large federal budgets funding climate alarm, including those at the weather service NOAA, are being annihilated. Not to put too fine a point on it, the general public is getting heartily fed up with the never-ending elite diet of climate alarm and silly predictions that never come to pass. They can smell a political rat when they see it in constant action. The danger for the UK Met Office is that going all in on this fearmongering with data that is not as ‘robust’ as is often claimed will erode hard-won trust in the organisation. Its main role is to warn of genuine weather dangers, not to use every hot, rainy or dry day as an excuse to ramp up mass climate psychosis.

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