State of the UK Climate Report 2024

By Paul Homewood

The UK Met Office has just published its annual State of the UK Climate report for last year. It reads more like a political pamphlet than a scientific one.

The Press Release sets the tone at the very start:

“Record breaking and extreme weather has become increasingly commonplace in the UK as our climate has changed over the last few decades.

The latest assessment of the UK’s climate shows how baselines are shifting, records are becoming more frequent, and that temperature and rainfall extremes are becoming the norm.”

Most people think of extreme weather as events like the winter of 1963, the Great North Sea Flood, the 1987 Storm or the heavy snowfalls and floods in 1948, not a mild February or sunny day in April.

They say the most noticeable change has been the rise in temperatures, which amounts to about a degree in the last 100 years. There are many possible reasons for this:

a) Natural recovery from Little Ice Age lows

b) Urbanisation

c) Poor siting

d) Cleaner air, resulting from Clean Air Acts

e) Greenhouse gases

But taking the Met Office data at face value, a rise of one degree is much less than the official Met Office projection of a five degree rise by 2100.

It is the latter that is the basis for the whole Net Zero agenda. Who would be prepared to spend a trillion and wreck the economy just to avoid a half a degree temperature rise in the next 50 years?

To put it into perspective, Oxford is about one degree warmer than Birmingham on average. Does that make Oxford’s climate more extreme? Of course not, the whole idea is as absurd as it is unscientific.

The Met Office claims that there has been an increasing frequency and intensity of daily temperature extremes. This is nonsense – while extremely hot days may be more common, these are offset by fewer extremely cold ones. Overall, the frequency of temperature extremes has not changed.

Rainfall

The Met Office also claim that “the UK’s climate has become steadily wetter since the 1980”. However, the 1970s and 80s were unusually dry decades.

Although the UK is currently in a run of wet years, there have been similarly wet periods in the past – the 1870s, 1910s and 1920s, for example.

Similarly, the Met Office claim that rainfall has become more extreme since the 1960s. But the full datasets show no such long-term trends.

Sea Levels

According to the Met Office report, sea level rise around the UK is accelerating, though no actual data is provided to support this claim.

The UK has three long running tidal gauge records – Aberdeen, North Shields and Newlyn. All three show the same pattern – sea levels have been rising no faster in recent years than in the first half of the 20^th century.

A period followed where sea level rise slowed, before returning back to earlier rates. For instance, North Shields:

Storms

Despite the hyping of winter storms by giving them all names, the Met Office report admits:

For the UK overall there are no storms in recent years which compare in severity with exceptional storms in the observations such as the ‘Burns’ Day Storm’ of 25 January 1990, the ‘Boxing Day Storm’ of 26 December 1998 and the ‘Great Storm’ of 16th October 1987.

Weather v Climate

Throughout the report, the Met Office confuse WEATHER and CLIMATE. Individual weather events are presented as evidence of a changing climate.

A good example is winter rainfall, which is said to have been increasing in the last decade or two.

The report includes a section on the North Atlantic Oscillation index (NAO), which is explained as follows:

This index is a measure of the large-scale surface pressure gradient in the North Atlantic between Gibraltar and Iceland, which determines the strength of westerly winds across the Atlantic, and is the principal mode of spatial variability of atmospheric patterns in this region. When the pressure difference is large, the WNAO is positive and westerly winds dominate with stronger and more frequent storms. When the pressure difference is small, the WNAO is negative with an increased tendency for blocked weather patterns, reducing the influence of Atlantic weather systems. The WNAO index is therefore associated with winters which are either mild and wet or cold and dry.

In recent years, the NAO has been strongly positive, just as it was in those equally wet years in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The NAO is a natural meteorological phenomenon, and clearly its switching to positive mode in the last decade must explain much of the recent increase in winter rainfall. Yet the Met Office ignore this fact and instead put the blame on climate change.

The whole report is 68 pages long, which I doubt anybody will bother to read.

The real intention was to publish a Press Release with scary, apocalyptic soundbites for the media to propagate.