Climate Crisis Update: April In The UK Shows A Gentle Warming Of 1.2C Over The Past 120 Years Plus Clear Evidence Of Natural Multidecadal Variability

A 1.2 degrees Celsius average April warming in the UK since 1890 accords very well with estimates of the average post industrial global warming cited by climate change fanatics who attribute (without hard evidence) all of that warming to man-made greenhouse gas emissions - despite the fact that the world started warming naturally after the coldest period of the Little Ice Age (1645-1715) and that post 1850 warming was just a continuation of the trend.

April 2023 wasn’t warm. Not as cold as 2021. Nowhere near as warm and incredibly sunny as 2020 when we were all imprisoned in our homes by fascist governments throughout the world. but particularly in Western industrialised northern hemisphere countries. I remember that glorious April very well. Me and the dogs spent hours illicitly wandering around in the glorious sunshine, made even brighter by the near complete absence of aircraft trails. I remember watching police vans driving around Peckham Rye park in London, loudspeakers blaring “NO SUNBATHING!” (because topping up Vitamin D levels in the fresh air was obviously the worst thing you could do to prevent being infected by a ‘deadly’ respiratory virus and staying at home watching Downing Street Covid press conferences on the telly, telling us how many people were dying, was obviously the best thing). I remember council jobsworths and plastic police constables harassing old folk for sitting on park benches and Constabulary drones following criminal walkers in the Peak District. Ah, those Halcyon Lockdown Days of April 2020! But I digress. Here is the latest Met Office chart of UK mean April temperature:

April 2023 sits just about on the 30 year average 1991-2020. April 2020 was pleasantly warm. April 2011 was the warmest April since records began. It’s been all downhill ever since. Sunshine hours shows a similar pattern, but whereas April 2020 and 2021 were both very sunny, April 2020 was much warmer. 2023 was not a particularly sunny month in the UK, again sitting around the 1991-2020 average.

Note the three successive peaks in the April mean temperature trend (black dashed line): 1895, 1945 and 2009. This almost exactly mirrors the fluctuating Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation:

Note also that the increase in temperature between the 1895 peak and the 2009 peak is about 1.2C (6.8C to 8.0C). So yes, it has got a bit warmer in Britain over the past 123 years, but there have been larger fluctuations due to natural Atlantic variability and, looking at the sunshine chart, the main reason for warmer Aprils in general appears to be the availability of sunshine, related to fluctuations in cloud cover, obviously. Weather, in other words, varying over decadal timescales.

It looks very much like we are on the downward side, heading towards generally cooler and less sunny April months. If the past is a guide to the future, April in the UK will get progressively cooler for 30 years from the warm peak in 2011. So, you’ll have to wait until 2041 for the ‘climate crisis’ to kick back in with a vengeance, but by then, the government will no doubt have banned all cars, all plane flights and all gas boilers plus thrown up wind turbines on every green hill and every marine migratory bird route possible, so we should all be safe.