XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.republicans, talk.politics.guns

'Massive Cover-up Launched by U.K. Met Office to Hide its 103
Non-Existent Temperature Measuring Stations'

<https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4283641/posts>

<https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/12/09/massive-cover-up-launched-by-u-k-met-office-to-hide-its-103-non-existent-temperature-measuring-stations/>

'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”.

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.

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 a result, Sanders discovered from a freedom of information request
that 103 of the 302 sites marked on the climate averages listing – over
a third of the total – no longer existed. Subsequently, Sanders sought further information about the methodology used to supply data for both Folkestone and Dover. In reply, the Met Office said it was unable to
supply details of the observing sites requested “as this is not recorded information”. It did however disclose that for non-existent stations “we use regression analysis to create a model of the relationship between
each station and others in the network”. This generates an estimate for
each month when the station is not operating. Each “estimate” is said to
be based on data from six other stations, chosen because they are “well correlated” with the target station.

In the case of Dover, the nearest ‘station’ is seven miles away at non-existent Folkestone followed by Manston which is 15 miles distant.
By “well correlated” perhaps the Met Office means they are in the same county of Kent. No matter, computer models are on hand to guide the way.

Ray Sanders had sent details of his findings to the new Labour science
minister Peter Kyle MP and the recent Met Office changes may have been
promoted by a discreet political push. At the time, Sanders asked: “How
would any reasonable observer know that the data was not real and was
simply ‘made up’ by a Government agency?” He called for an open declaration of likely inaccuracies of existing published data “to avoid
other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching
erroneous conclusions”.

The Met Office also runs an historical data section where a number of
sites with long records of temperature are identified. Lowestoft closed
in 2010 and since then the figures have been estimated. The stations at
Nairn Druim, Paisley and Newton Rigg have also closed but are still
reporting estimated monthly data. “Why would any scientific organisation
feel the need to publish what can only be described as fiction?” asks Sanders.

The original Braemar station in Aberdeenshire has recorded temperature
data since Victorian times. Due to its interesting topography surrounded
by high mountains, it recorded the U.K.’s coldest temperature of -27.2°C
in both 1895 and 1982. In summer, the temperature can soar as the heat
stays trapped. A new site, some distance from the original, was set up
in 2005 and in common with Met Office procedure was labelled Braemar 2
to reflect both distance and climatological differences. In the
historical data section of the Met’s website, Braemar 2 is shown
supplying data back to 1959. “For reasons I find difficult to
understand, the Met Office has chosen to highlight a spurious merging of
two notably different data sets for an illogically defined period that
fails to represent either site,” observes Sanders.

The recent changes made by the Met Office to its climate average pages
shows that the state-funded operation is fully aware of the growing
interest in its entire temperature recording business. This interest has
grown because the Met Office is fully committed to using its data to
promote the Net Zero political fantasy. But it is silent on the biggest
concern that has been raised of late, namely the promotion of
temperatures, accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, obtained
from a nationwide network where nearly eight out of 10 stations are so
poorly sited they have internationally-recognised ‘uncertainties’ as
high as 5°C

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