There's Something Very Fishy About Met Office Claim Of Hottest May Ever!

It certainly did not feel like it I can tell you - at least from the perspective of someone living in the bright red area near the Cumbrian coast! The above is a map of the mean daily (day and night) monthly temperature anomaly. You can see it’s most extreme in northern Scotland. So what was going on in Scotland?

Here is a graph of the mean maximum (daytime) temperature anomalies for Scotland:

That’s quite a leap from the previous hottest May of 2018 and the second hottest on record occurring way back in 1896. But look at the mean minimum daytime temperature:

That’s just incredible. It is 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than the previous maximum, which was just 2 years ago, in 2022. What is causing this? Why are temperatures so high at night in northern Scotland? It might have something to do with cloud cover. Sunshine hours were very limited in Scotland and it is probable that the clouds during the day persisted overnight, keeping temperatures up, but sunshine hours were far from the lowest on record:

Something else must explain this huge leap in night time temperature in Scotland. The situation was similar in England and Wales, though not so extreme:

In central England - the world’s longest running database - there’s also something very strange going on. In terms of the daily mean temperature, May was the second warmest since 1659 apparently! This doesn’t ring true. May was unremarkable here, cool even. Looking at the daytime maximum temperatures since 1878, May 2024 was beaten by 7 other warmer May months, but it was still remarkably warm. This again does not ring true from my perspective here in NW England and there are plenty of other people living in other areas of England who will testify to a similar experience. But it is the mean night time minimum temperatures which are truly remarkable:

May 2024 was supposedly a full 1 degree hotter than the previous May night time monthly mean in 1889. What is remarkable is that the rankings below 2024 differ only by 0.1C from each other, a tenth of the leap in 2024! That doesn’t seem credible to me, unless something very, very unusual is happening in the north Atlantic. That may be the case, looking at the scary graphs, but I’m still sceptical. Why should a record warm Atlantic mean that night time temperatures in particular are so extraordinarily in excess of previous records? A lot more moisture and clouds maybe, bumping up temperatures overnight particularly? Maybe. I haven’t had trouble sleeping I must admit. We’ve often had the wood burning stove on during the evenings just to take the chill off.

Whatever the cause, be it actual physical/meteorological, or something else (Met Office weather stations have recently been criticised for being very poor quality), it’s pretty obvious that it’s not a sudden acceleration in man-made global warming from greenhouse gas emissions. That’s just too absurd to contemplate. What we have as alternative explanations thus far are: ‘weird’ El Nino, reduction in aerosol cooling from ship fuel emissions, some extraordinary solar/AMO cyclical change or Hunga Tonga. But don’t expect to hear too much about the last two either from the Met Office or the mainstream media.