Oops - Met Office Publish Graph Which Shows Almost Beyond Doubt That Recent Warming In The UK Is NOT Predominantly Man-Made
h/t Mark Hodgson
I just noticed this, whilst searching online for the ‘State of the UK Climate 2022’. It hasn’t been published by the Met Office yet, but will be published very soon, no doubt accompanied by the usual alarmist fanfare in the MSM. Back in Jan this year, Mark McCarthy, Nikos Christidis and Peter Stott (the usual suspects) posted this pre-empt to the full analysis at Carbon Brief:
It starts off with the usual ‘OMG, climate change!’ guff:
Last year was a dramatic one for the UK’s climate.
The year of 2022 will be remembered for the passing of two significant milestones – a daily maximum temperature of more than 40C and a national average temperature over the year of more than 10C.
In this review, we unpack the UK’s climate of 2022 and show that both these notable records were highly unlikely to have occurred without the influence of human-caused climate change.
Boring. Predictable. But then the authors do something interesting, they publish this graph, with the following explanation:
Currently, our official statistics for the UK go back to 1884 for temperature . . . . . .
But we also have the Met Office Central England Temperature series (CET), which spans 1659-2022. This is the longest instrumental climate series in the world and the result of pioneering work by the scientist Gordon Manley in the mid-20th century. He uncovered historical weather records and diaries extending back several centuries, culminating in the construction of a temperature series representative of central England from 1659 . . . . . .
It is worth noting that 2022 was the warmest year in both the UK-wide and CET records.
We often get asked about the differences between the two series, but in much the same way that the rankings and values for each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can differ, so can the CET and UK series.
However, although there are inevitable differences between the two datasets for any given date, the overwhelming message from plotting these annual temperature series together is how closely they agree – overlapping by around 97%.
You can see this in the chart below, which shows the full CET record (black line) with the UK-wide record overlaid (red line). The dashed lines show the 1991-2020 reference periods in the two records for comparison.
The CET series therefore provides strong evidence that it is highly unlikely that a UK-wide warmer year could have occurred in the last 364 years. The year-to-year, and even decade-to-decade variability, in our climate is evident in this long time series but it can also be seen that the warming of our climate means that a cold year now, such as 2010, is not as severe as cold years of past centuries, while a warm year now, such as 2022, is much more likely to break records.
The reference climatology for our current climate is the period 1991-2020, and it is noteworthy that in the 332 years before this – from 1659 to 1990 – there were only 12 years with an annual average temperature above this modern day baseline, highlighting how climate change is moving UK average temperatures outside of historical ranges.
They are using the very close correlation between annual mean CET and the later UK wide temperature series to come to the conclusion that the UK is the warmest it’s been since 1659 and that it’s climate change wot dunnit. Well yes, agreed, in terms of annual mean temperature, the UK is considerably warmer than it was in 1659. But, having demonstrated that CET annual mean temperature is a reliable indicator for the UK as a whole, we can now examine in detail the ups and downs of the UK climate going back to the mid 17th century and what we see is a very interesting picture which belies the simplistic notion put forward by the Met Office and our government that recent warming in the UK has been caused almost exclusively by man-made greenhouse gases.
First off, it blows a hole in the Met office recent claim that June 2023 was the ‘warmest on record’ because it wasn’t, as I showed here:
Now we know that CET is a good proxy for UK mean annual temperature, we can reasonably presume that the monthly means are probably quite accurate too, which means that June 2023 was nowhere near the hottest June that we have experienced in the UK. So we can immediately dispense with that most recent Met Office propaganda courtesy of the Stott, McCarthy and Christidis graph.
But there’s more. Much more. Look at the ups and downs of CET. What causes them? In particular, look at the warming from the 1680s to about 1730, a period of just 50 years. It was huge, exceeding both in magnitude and rapidity the observed UK warming from the end of the 70s to present (45 years), which is attributed in its entirety to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. What caused that warming? Peat burning? 4x4 horse drawn carriages? The UK climate has warmed and cooled several times over the centuries, all the while gradually warming overall since the end of the Little Ice Age. Most notably, it warmed considerably from about 1890 to the end of the 1940s and then it cooled quite significantly in the 50s, 60s and 70s. What caused the early 20th century warming and the mid 20th century cooling? It wasn’t greenhouse gases - there weren’t enough in the atmosphere. ‘Scientists’ tell us that the mid 20th century cooling was caused mainly by aerosols from industry. Yeah right, so what caused all the earlier episodes of cooling then?
‘Scientists’ tell us that the sun doesn’t much affect the UK climate and does not explain recent warming, but it just so happens that the coolest period of the Little Ice Age in Britain (1645-1715) coincided with the Maunder sunspot minimum and the modern warming has coincided with the modern solar maximum which began in the 1950s and ended at the beginning of the 21st century. UK temperatures haven’t moved much in the 21st century and hence the Met Office has had to engage in some decidedly dodgy statistical manipulation recently to prove that the trend is still upwards:
Before
After
Something’s not right there. One hot year at the end of the series should not produce such an acceleration in the trend.
Besides the Sun possibly affecting UK climate, here is a graph of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which we know for sure does affect the UK climate over decadal timescales.
What do we notice by comparing this graph with the Met Office temperature graph?
The 1940s warming coincides with the positive peak phase of the AMO, the mid 20th century cooling coincides with the negative phase of AMO, which bottomed out in 1975 and the rapid warming from the late 1970s to the early 21st century correlates exactly with the upturn in AMO. Of course, ‘correlation is not causation, blah, blah, blah,’ they will say, but this shows at the very least that it is highly likely that the AMO contributed significantly to modern UK warming post 1979, which brings into serious doubt the claim that virtually all recent warming is man-made. With the fact that the UK climate has demonstrably oscillated between warm and cool periods over centuries, with the fact that those oscillations are comparable to, or even greater than modern warming, with the fact that the UK climate has been warming gradually overall since the end of the Little Ice Age and that we have two plausible natural explanations to explain at least some, if not a large majority of climate change in the UK, the claim by the Met Office that current climate change (and weather variability) in the UK is driven entirely by man-made global warming looks very suspect.
A quick comment as I'm travelling. I picked up on several of your points, including the "stonking" warming spurt which started in the late 1600s, in my CET analysis of a few years ago hosted by my pal Ed Hoskins: https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/uk-temperature-analysis-from-1659-to-2019/. Obviously, it got zero politician response.
Nicely put, CO2 driven anthroprogenic global warming is a fantasy, a figment of computer modeling created to blame CO2. The sun is the big kahuna!