The Met Office is the United Kingdom's official government weather service, akin to our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and is supported by the British taxpayers. With that being the case, and with weather forecasting being something of an art but nonetheless one that relies on a scrupulous assessment of data to make forecasts, wouldn't you expect the Met Office to be, well, honest? Don't the British taxpayers have the right to expect honesty from the Met Office?
Well, that's not what they are getting. It turns out that the Met Office has been making some claims about climate change, and to support those claims, citing data from over 300 temperature monitoring stations.
The problem is...over 100 of them don't exist. Chris Morrison, the Daily Sceptic's Environment Editor, has the receipts.
Last month, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the practice at the U.K. Met Office of inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims. The move has not been announced in public, needless to say, since drawing attention to this would open a pandora’s box and run the risk of subjecting all the Met Office temperature claims to wider scrutiny. Instead, the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages”.
Hear that scraping sound? That's the sound of goalposts being moved. And, not to be outdone, the Met Office has moved those goalposts completely off the field. The Met Office got caught, and now they are trying to fudge the data — but facts are stubborn things.
Significant modifications have been made to the new page, designed no doubt to quash suspicions that the Met Office has been making the figures up as it went along. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991-2020 has been replaced with the explanation that the page “is designed to display locations that provide even geographical coverage of the U.K., but it is not reflective of every weather station that has existed or the current Met Office observation network”. Under the new page the locations are still referred to as “climate stations” but the details of where they are, exactly, have been omitted.
The cynical might note that the Met Office has solved its problem of inventing data from non-existing stations by suggesting that they now arise from “locations” which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed, or indeed exist today. If this is a reasonable interpretation of the matter, it might suggest that the affair is far from closed.
Far from closed? That's something of an understatement. But then, the Brits are known for that.
But there's a climate-scam sleuth on the trail of the Met Office's prevarications.
Again we are obliged to the diligent citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to the unannounced Met Office changes and providing a link to the previous averages page on the Wayback Machine. The sleuthing Sanders has been on the case for some time, having discovered that three named stations near where he lives, namely Dungeness, Folkestone and Dover, did not exist. The claimed co-ordinates for Dover placed the station in the water on the local beach as shown by the Google Earth photo below.
OK, this isn't even a competent attempt to fudge. A location in the water? Over 100 temperature monitoring stations that don't exist, but data from which are mysteriously being folded into the trendline of summer temperatures?
Even if this station wasn't in the water, we might well remind ourselves of how hot beach sand can get in direct sunshine. Water or not, that's not the right place for a temperature monitoring station.
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It's one thing when activists fudge the facts about climate change. Annoying as those activists are, including a certain Swedish Doom Pixie I could name, they at least aren't funded by taxpayer dollars. But if a nation is to have a weather service that is a branch of the national government (our own NOAA is part of the Commerce Department), shouldn't the taxpayers be able to expect not only a degree of competence but a big measure of honesty?
It would seem not; not when there is an agenda to be served.
To be fair, there's probably a role for a national weather service. Weather forecasting, like roads and the military, seems a pretty reasonable example of a distributed interest that may best be handled by the government at some level. But in return for taxpayer funding, the taxpayers should be able to expect honesty, open analysis of data, and some measure of accuracy. The UK Met Office is falling short. What's more, they are trying to fudge their dishonesty. That's intolerable.
