Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The Met Office has claimed that a new Welsh temperature record for springtime was set in Cardiff last month.
The place where it was recorded, Bute Park, is a Class 5 junk site and is arguably one of the most inappropriate places to measure temperatures.
The weather station at Bute is just yards away from the large plant nursery, full of greenhouses and banks of solar panels on the roof of the visitor centre.
As the Bute Park information video relates, all its greenhouses are very carefully temperature controlled during hot weather. This means the venting of hot air.
If that was not bad enough, the weather station compound is surrounded by concrete on three sides and high vegetation on the other, which appears to have grown considerably since the 1978 photos below were taken.
Any one of these factors should disqualify Bute Park as being representative of temperatures in the locality. No wonder then that the Met Office themselves have categorised it as Class 5, the worst of the WMO’s five categories.
The WMO, World Meteorological Organisation, rules state that a pristine temperature reading site must meet the following criteria:
Bute Park is so poorly sited that it does not even meet Class 4 criteria, itself a junk designation. Instead, Class 5 covers all sites that don’t meet any criteria at all.
The WMO states that Class 5 sites can overestimate temperatures by as much as 5C. The WMO are perfectly clear that junk sites like Bute Park should not be used for climatological purposes and cannot be regarded as being representative of the surrounding environment.
But that is exactly what the Met Office are doing when they declare record temperatures at sites like Bute Park.
Kew Gardens is rapidly becoming the new Heathrow as the favoured Met Office site for producing unnatural heat spikes in place of true, uncorrupted ambient air temperatures. This is, of course, useful for suggesting climate collapse and catastrophe to back the Net Zero fantasy, but it is hardly meteorological science at its finest. Kew played a central role in the curated alarums that greeted the recent first heatwave of the British summer.
Kew Gardens is rapidly becoming the new Heathrow as the favoured Met Office site for producing unnatural heat spikes in place of true, uncorrupted ambient air temperatures. This is, of course, useful for suggesting climate collapse and catastrophe to back the Net Zero fantasy, but it is hardly meteorological science at its finest. Kew played a central role in the curated alarums that greeted the recent first heatwave of the British summer. Notable by its absence in the mainstream was the relevant information that Kew has shocking form in producing sudden spikes into record territory, displaying a recording pattern that would be highly unlikely to occur at a site that measured natural air properly.
The reaction across mainstream and social media was often hysterical. This effort from social commentator Matthew Todd was typical of countless bedwetting posts on X.
You’ve got to be off the scale batshit crazy to demand scrapping Net Zero during a record breaking unprecedented spring heatwave— Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 (@MrMatthewTodd) May 27, 2026
Last year, the Met Office claimed an all-time UK high May 1st temperature at Kew of 29.3°C. Analysis by citizen scientist Dr Eric Huxter showed the temperature was almost 2°C above that recorded in the hour before – well above what might be expected from such temperature rises seen during the day, with movements commonly around the plus or minus 0.2°C to 0.4°C mark.
The first record claimed last week was on Tuesday May 25th, when the temperature at the Kew site rose to 34.8°C – some 1.3°C above the previous hour. Dr Huxter has told the Daily Sceptic that some doubt remains over the figures for the next day, when the temperature hit 35.1°C. Since April last year, Huxter observes that Kew has provided no fewer than 13 daily UK extremes with an average heat spike of 1°C. By comparison, in the same period Heathrow supplied 35 temperature spikes averaging 1.2°C.
The main culprit in producing these heat spikes is the switch from liquid-in-bulb thermometers to PRT automatic electronic measuring devices during the last 30 years. These provide a more accurate reading every minute, but it is plain that they are picking up every passing heat spike – often unnatural – that were missed by slower-moving liquid in a glass bulb. Dr Huxter has calculated that in the glass-bulb era up to 1989, the 40 new records (0.3 a year) averaged steps from the previous high of 0.5°C, while from 1990 there have been 147 new records (four per year) with average steps of 1.5°C. This sudden change is used by alarmists – many of them employed by the Met Office – to suggest dramatic climate change. But an obvious and plausible explanation is provided by the switch to more accurate measuring devices.
One-minute heat spikes at the 24-hour maximum are used to calculate daily average temperatures, which eventually find their way into national and international databases. Taking an average of temperatures over five minutes or longer would help reduce the unnatural distortions, but the Met Office seems unwilling to make such an adjustment. By such measurements have flawed decisions on Net Zero been made around the world, costing untold sums of money and contributing to the ongoing destruction of the industrial base of many countries, including the UK.
The heat spikes at urban heat-ravaged Met Office sites are doing much of the heavy lifting in stoking the climate fear that is vital to promoting the political Net Zero cause. Nevertheless, are we sure that such spikes are largely unnatural? Can they occur, for instance, at an open-field site far from artificial influences, where there can be no doubt that the only substance being measured is uncontaminated natural air? Over the last year, Dr Huxter has provided dramatic proof that they cannot – at least not on the regular scale seen at the sites that enter the record books. In that period, he analysed 525,541 minute-by-minute recordings at the Class I site in open farmland at Rothamsted.
The graph above shows clearly that at a pristine site, the vast majority of the half a million readings vary from the previous hour within individual differences in a range between -0.15°C and 0.25°C. Most individual changes were to be found between -0.35°C and 0.45°C. As part of his year-long project, Huxter examined 340 daily maximum temperature highs recorded across 96 Met Office stations and discovered that these sites showed average short heat spikes of around 1.1°C – similar, of course, to the performance of both the Kew and Heathrow stations.
Comparing the Rothamsted control with the 360 heat spikes, a chi-square test showed a highly significant difference of p<0.0,001. This means that if there were truly no difference between the sites, the chances of observing such a large discrepancy in heat spikes would be less than one in 10,000 – in other words, more unlikely than one in 10,000 and quite possibly far smaller: one in 100,000, for example.
It is easy to understand why Kew is now giving Heathrow airport some competition in the heat spikes and ‘record’ temperatures stakes. Dr Huxter’s illustration below has been doing the rounds on social media. There are no jet aircraft on the move, but there are plenty of nearby sources of heat available to bump up the temperatures. Of interest is the plethora of large glasshouses that automatically vent hot air when temperatures climb above 28°C. Every little helps, the cynical might note, when new records are being chased.
It was always a mystery why Kew was a CIMO Class 2 site with no recording ‘uncertainties’. This designation now appears to have been withdrawn, and it is presumably in the junk classes of 3, 4 and 5 – where possible recording errors up to 1°C, 2°C and 5°C respectively are officially noted – that it now resides.
Paul Homewood has suggested that the early June heatwave of 1947 was every bit as intense as last week’s blast. Temperatures of 94°F were recorded on June 3rd at Waddington and in London at Camden Square and Kensington. Notes Homewood: “In contrast, 95°F at Kew probably includes three degrees of UHI [Urban Heat Island]… the evidence from June 1947 does more than undermine Met Office claims that this week’s heatwave is evidence of climate change. It raises the question why they are not giving the public all of the relevant facts by telling them we have had similar weather in the past.”
The last word must go to Dr Huxter: “The observed changes in temperature over the past 30 years therefore owe more to flaws in measurement… rather than any wider anthropogenic effect. The uncritical adoption of the PRT technology, which conveniently reinforced what the modellers believed, now drives the Net Zero Cult.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released six Assessment Reports (AR), averaging one every five years four months. The IPCC ARs contain the latest representations of climate science applied to human impacts on the terrestrial climate.
This is the second in a series of 12 articles challenging climate change orthodoxy commissioned by Professor Gwythian Prins. We will be publishing the articles at a rate of one a week over the next 12 weeks (read the first article here). The hope is that they can be collected into a book for Sixth Formers and university students.
Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released six Assessment Reports (AR), averaging one every five years four months. The IPCC ARs contain the latest representations of climate science applied to human impacts on the terrestrial climate. Over the intervening 35 years, expressions of concern about human-produced emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases have evolved from speculative warnings that they may change the climate for the worse to dead certainties of having done so.
IPCC certainties notwithstanding, the climate itself has shown no manifestations of a great change. As ably conveyed by the Oxford-trained physicist Ralph Alexander, extremes of climate have not increased. Like fusion power, year by year human-caused climate disaster seems to be always 20 years in the future.
A word about temperature extremes. The climate has been warming since the Little Ice Age – the 1300-1850 cold period. Widespread monitoring of air temperature did not begin until about 1850, just as the modern warming trend began. Starting with measurements from a cold period, a warming climate will necessarily produce a series of ever-new ‘record temperatures’ of no particular significance.
My own journey into this wilderness began with the IPCC third Assessment Report. The media din of accusatory polemics was exhausting. As a means of retaining sanity, I decided to discover for myself whether there was a need to worry about CO2 emissions and climate.
After two years study, I learned that climate models make huge mistakes when modelling the climate. This was a Damascus moment. Large errors meant the IPCC could not possibly know what it claimed to know.
Examining climate modelling papers with a new clarity, I saw that these modelling mistakes never conditioned the published analyses or conclusions. Claiming that climate models can resolve an effect of our CO2 emissions on the climate is rather like claiming one can use a jeweller’s loupe to resolve the outlines of an atom.
A further discovery followed: IPCC air temperature projections are simplistic. The modelled climate is made to warm passively in response to increased CO2 as though nothing else changed.
Attempts to publish this work in peer-reviewed scientific journals led to a further discovery. Namely, that climate scientists, apart from research meteorologists, are evidently untrained in determining the physical integrity of climatological data.
My reviewers showed no ability to distinguish between statistical uncertainty and physical error. Likewise, propagation of uncertainty seemed a foreign language to them. Such a shocking lack of training in how to evaluate the integrity of one’s own data is to be expected only in a naïf who had never taken even a high school physical science course. Climate modellers are apparently unprepared to evaluate the physical reliability of their own models.
As a personal aside, my impression was that some reviewers read the title, ‘Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections’, and merely inferred the content before writing a review. I did not realise the title would sow such confusion. In point of fact, uncertainty is propagated therein rather than physical error. They are very different. But one must read the paper to discover this. “Propagation of error” is the name by which I learned the method and I defaulted to that rendering. I should have been more explicit and titled the paper, “Propagation of Uncertainty and…”.
Publication finally came after six years, 13 journal submissions and 30 reviews. The reviewers for Frontiers in Earth Science: Atmospheres provided the knowledgeable and constructive reviews one expects in the physical sciences. I have continued to receive misconstrued criticisms which I rebut in specific detail, forming a now lengthy commentary alongside the 2019 original.
Analysis of the simplistic climate modelling approach to air temperature projections and the confounding simulation errors they made revealed that nothing can presently be known about the effect of CO2 emissions on air temperature. Climate models are far too coarse to resolve the very small impacts of increased CO2, or even to inform us whether our CO2 emissions produce a discernible effect at all. The story is summarised in the Figure.
Figure. Left panel: (D), projected surface air temperature resulting from the emissions of Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 370; average of 68 CMIP6-generation climate models. The line is an emulation using a simple equation with total forcing (greenhouse gases plus volcanic) as the only variable.
Right panel: the same as the left, but now with uncertainty bounds originating from poor thermal resolution due to model errors in cloud cover. The uncertainty range does not indicate possible future air temperature. Rather, that the correct future air temperature is lost in the uncertainty. It is not knowable. The air temperature projection itself is thereby meaningless.
To understand the Figure, it is necessary to understand uncertainty as it is used in the physical sciences. First, uncertainty is not error. Error is the difference between a calculated result and the physically true value. Uncertainty is a measure of our ignorance concerning the physical truth-value of a result. It conveys how much confidence one should have in that result. Errors can be seen. Uncertainty is a judgement (which can often be made quantitative).
One cannot observe the air temperatures of the future. They are not knowable. Therefore, one can never know the error of an air temperature projection. This is a major impediment to judging reliability.
However, one can know the uncertainty of the projection. One gets a handle on uncertainty by calibrating the climate models by how well they reproduce the salient observables of the past climate.
Climate models are adjusted to reproduce the air temperatures of the past hundred years. However, they have considerable trouble reproducing the global cloud cover of the recently past climate. This deficiency is known because global cloud cover has been directly observable since 1979, the beginning of the satellite era.
Clouds are a prime controller of the heat energy of the lower atmosphere. The intensity of atmospheric heat energy determines the air temperature. If the adjusted climate models get the past air temperature right, but get the cloud cover wrong, a deep problem is revealed. Wrongly simulated cloud cover should not produce rightly simulated air temperatures. This problem is the case.
The known deficiency in reproducing global cloud cover means that when climate models simulate the future climate, the simulated future cloud cover will be wrong. How wrong, no one knows.
But if simulated future cloud cover is wrong, then the heat energy of the simulated future atmosphere will be wrong, and the projected future air temperature will be wrong. How wrong, no one knows.
It is not controversial that climate models cannot be adjusted to reproduce unknown future cloud cover. However, calibration of climate models against the past climate reveals how wrongly they simulate past cloud cover. We thus know how wrongly they simulate atmospheric heat energy. This, in turn, bears on how poorly climate models are likely able to simulate future air temperature.
Suppose you are using a climate model in a super computer to simulate the future of climate and air temperature. You enter everything you know about the present climate, and then add an estimate for how levels of atmospheric CO2 might change in the future. You hit ‘return’ and off it goes.
Initially, within the computer, the simulated future climate will be similar to the present climate, because the initial change in CO2 is small. Atmospheric heat energy and global cloud cover will not have yet changed much. But with the step-by-step simulation, computed CO2 increases (say), and global cloud cover, atmospheric heat energy and thus projected air temperatures are all simulated incorrectly. How incorrectly, we don’t know.
If CO2 increased the same way in the physically real world as in the computed world, the physically real climate would respond in whatever way the climate responds. But with each new simulation step, our knowledge of the difference between the simulated future climate and the analogous physically real future climate, diminishes.
With every step that simulates cloud cover, heat energy and air temperature all wrongly we have less and less knowledge of this difference. We know there is a difference. How different, we don’t know.
But we can calculate our level of ignorance because calibration of the climate model told us how wrong each simulation step is likely to be. Not how wrong it is, just how wrong it is likely to be.
This is the meaning of the spread of uncertainty around the projection in the figure after 2000. Our ignorance of how far removed the simulated future air temperature is from the physically true but unknown future air temperature has increased with each step of the simulation.
By 2100, the uncertainty is so wide (our ignorance is so great) that the projected future air temperature conveys no physical knowledge at all. In point of fact, none of the projected future air temperatures convey any real information. The projection has no reliability at all.
This ignorance provides an explanation for how it is we’ve gotten into such a mess over climate.
Reiterating the result of this study: climate model air temperature projections have no predictive value. Nor have they any prescriptive value. Projections of future air temperature are physically meaningless. They literally reveal nothing whatever about the level of future air temperature. Not for next year, not for 2050, not for 2100, nor for any other future year.
Since publishing on the physical vacuity attending the climate modelling of future air temperature, I have further investigated and published upon the reliability of the historical air temperature record, and the relation of temperature and CO2 across the 66 million years of the Cenozoic.
There is insufficient space to discuss these works. However, the story remains the same.
The accuracy of measured historical air temperatures is impacted by the local environment. Insufficient wind speed or intensity of direct and reflected sunlight put significant errors into the measured air temperature of even perfectly good, naturally ventilated temperature sensors.
These errors, of unknown size or sign, are permanent in the historical record. They are not reduced by increasing the number of measurements. Those compiling the historical air temperature record do not take these inaccuracies into account and seem to care nothing for instrumental field calibration. Other problems also abound.
The historical and neglected inaccuracies infest past measurements and are forever cryptic. They cannot be accounted or removed from the record. The conclusion stemming therefrom is that neither the rate nor the magnitude of atmospheric warming since 1850 is knowable.
Lastly, over the prior 66 million years, nearly the entire level of atmospheric CO2 can be explained by the temperature of the upper ocean – the part that is in direct communication with the atmosphere. Evidently, for the past 66 million years, atmospheric CO2 was not a driver of climate warmth. Rather, the warmth of the climate drove the level of atmospheric CO2.
The inevitable conclusion is that neither the IPCC nor climate modellers, nor the Royal Society or the US National Academies, nor any government agency or environmental NGO, can possibly know what it asserts about the impact of human CO2 emissions on global air temperature.
At this juncture, what we do know for a certainty is that all the repetition about the ‘settled science’ of CO2 – let alone anthropogenic CO2 – as an unequivocal primary driver of climate change with harmful effect does not make it true. The same deep uncertainty surrounds catastrophic climate change. The truth remains enveloped in clouds of uncertainty which the models simply cannot pierce.
Dr Patrick Frank is a research physical methods experimental chemist, now Scientific Staff Emeritus of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, USA.
Another shocking example of decades-long invented temperature figures at non-existent UK Met Office measuring stations has come to light. The Lephinmore ‘station’ was situated in the upper reaches of the Firth of Clyde, and according to the “location-specific long-term averages” Met Office database it can supply monthly temperature readings along with rainfall amounts going back to 1960. This supply can be considered a modern scientific wonder given that the actual station closed five months before England won the World Cup in 1966.
Another shocking example of decades-long invented temperature figures at non-existent UK Met Office measuring stations has come to light. The Lephinmore ‘station’ was situated in the upper reaches of the Firth of Clyde, and according to the “location-specific long-term averages” Met Office database it can supply monthly temperature readings along with rainfall amounts going back to 1960. This supply can be considered a modern scientific wonder given that the actual station closed five months before England won the World Cup in 1966.
The usual form when the Met Office is asked to provide further and better particulars on its invention techniques is for the explanation to be given that batches of figures from “well-correlated neighbouring stations” are modelled by a computer. But in the case of location-specific station Lephinmore, there are no neighbouring stations, well-correlated or otherwise.
The three nearest with any long-term records are CIMO Class 4 ‘junk’ station Dunstaffnage at 27 miles distance, Class 4 Glasgow Bishopton 29 miles away, and the Class 4 airport site 45 miles away at Prestwick Gannet. A station called “Bute: Rothesay” is said to be 18 miles away but this closed some time ago. A new station “Bute: Rothesay No 2” opened in 2012 and this is also in the Class 4 junk portfolio. The considerable distances involved and the ‘junk’ nature of all the sites with internationally recognised uncertainties of up to 2°C, would appear to rule out well-correlation for either a single ‘station’ or a fudged ‘location-specific’ claim.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the idea that an airport site can provide scientific information about likely temperature and rainfall conditions at a rural location 45 miles away is little short of risible. A Class 4 site is unable to give a true ambient air temperature in its own backyard, let alone one tens of miles distance.
This is what is claimed on the Met Office’s public access “location-specific long-term averages” database for Lephinmore. Two option are available to track 30-year average monthly totals from 1961-1990 and 1991-2020. As noted, it is truly a wonder of modern meteorological science that maximum and minimum temperature averages can be calculated from so far away to one hundredth of a degree Centigrade. And local rainfall to two decimal depth points. Such precision indeed!
Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders has been on this case along with many other ‘smoking guns’ during the course of his forensic examination of the Met Office’s records and claims. He also presented proof of the closure of Lephinmore from February 15th 1966.
After over a year of digging into the state of the Met Office’s temperature network along with the statistics it produces and the modelling that supplies reams of invented data, Sanders is not inclined to be charitable. “An alternative view of this climate averaging system is that it is a work of complete fiction… it is an insult to the public’s intelligence and demonstrates a complete disregard for even the tiniest vestige of scientific credibility,” he suggests. Needless to say, the Met Office takes a different approach, charging that the investigative efforts of a small number of people are “an attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world’s changing climate”. Unfortunately, the Met Office seems to live in the Net Zero-inspired world of ‘settled’ climate science. It appears blissfully unaware that real world science is only “robust” when it emerges intact after relentless and forensic examination.
The “location-specific long-term averages” database was until recently called “UK climate averages”. It invited the public to select an individual climate station to provide a selected 30-year average. But Sanders revealed that more than a third – 103 out of 302 – of the stations promoted, complete with their supposed coordinates and elevations, did not exist. A hasty rewrite then followed from the Met Office and this explained that the invented data arose from ‘locations’ which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed, or indeed exist today. Despite this, as the image above for Lephinmore shows, the data still appear for a named “station”.
A subsequent Science Feedback ‘fact-check’ that seemed to have been largely written by the Met Office said the average data for the closed stations was not “fabricated” but estimated using “well-correlated neighbouring stations”. It’s an explanation for the inventions but as we can see in the case of Lephinmore, the lack of nearby stations, well-correlated or otherwise, draws yet more questions.
Subsequent “undermining” questions from the few then put the cat among the pigeons in the case of Lowestoft. This station was one of only 37 supplying information for a separate “historical” database but it closed in 2010. Lowestoft does not have any well-correlated stations nearby – the nearest are over 35 miles away – a fact confirmed in a Daily Sceptic Freedom of Information (FOI) request. For Lowestoft, the Met Office then claimed that it did not use “well-correlated neighbouring stations” and a different explanation was supplied: “We used the gridded value from the closest grid point from our UK climate dataset HADUK-Grid.” But this explanation does not seem to take the curious – if not downright cynical – investigator very far, since the HADUK-Grid uses “well-correlated neighbouring station” data derived from the Met Office’s Integrated Data Archive System (MIDAS) to model infill data for closed stations.
Whatever is going on, the Met Office removed the Lowestoft invented data from 2010. Perish the thought that anyone should think this station as an infilling “well-correlated neighbouring station” – or not as the case may be – would cascade fake figures throughout databases using modelled temperature information, corrupting the ‘records’ as it went. Conveniently added at the time to the public explanation on the historic database was a short note that read: “The purpose of this webpage is to provide a sample of historical station data across the UK for general interest. It is not used for formal climate monitoring.”
Meanwhile, doubts have started to emerge about some of the Met Office’s rainfall claims, used invariably to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Its recent claim that Worcestershire recorded its wettest February since records began in 1835 has been effectively debunked by the great, long-time climate sceptic Paul Homewood following FOI requests. He found convincing evidence from historical records that more rain fell in the area in February 1923. “Is British weather really getting wetter as they claim. Or is it just a figment of their computer’s imagination?” he asks.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Convincing statistical proof has emerged over the last year to show that the UK Met Office is inflating maximum temperature readings to create Net Zero-supporting climate alarm. Over the last 30 years, the Met Office has produced the vast majority of its data from unnaturally heat-ravaged ‘junk’ sites using newly-installed accurate electronic devices able to record one minute heat spikes.
Convincing statistical proof has emerged over the last year to show that the UK Met Office is inflating maximum temperature readings to create Net Zero-supporting climate alarm. Over the last 30 years, the Met Office has produced the vast majority of its data from unnaturally heat-ravaged ‘junk’ sites using newly-installed accurate electronic devices able to record one minute heat spikes. The independent researcher Dr Eric Huxter has taken a year to examine the unnatural sudden rises that supply many daily ‘records’, and compared the overall spike averages with a pristine CIMO Class 1 control station. He concludes that it “could well explain the step change in rate of temperature change, and the marked increase in the step of new daily maximum records since 1990”.
During his year-long project, Dr Huxter examined 340 daily maximum temperature highs recorded across 96 Met Office stations and discovered that these sites showed average short heat spikes around 1.1°C. Most of these spikes occurred around daily ‘records’ in junk CIMO Class 3, 4 and 5 locations. These sites have internationally recognised ‘uncertainties’ or possible errors of 1°C, 2°C and 5°C respectively. But spikes in temperature can occur naturally, so Huxter consulted a full year of individual minute temperature figures at a pristine Class 1 site in open farmland at Rothamsted. From the purchased records – a total of 525,541 – he was able to compile a baseline probability control.
Here is the kicker – comparing the Rothamsted control with the 360 heat spikes at the largely junk sites, a chi-square test showed a highly significant difference of p <0.0001. This means that if there were truly no difference between the sites, the chances of observing such a large discrepancy in heat spikes would be less than one in 10,000 – in other words, more unlikely than one in 10,000 and quite possibly far smaller – for example, one in 100,000.
Using such obviously flawed data, the Met Office’s Chief Scientist Professor Stephen Belcher calls for Net Zero to “stabilise the climate”, reporting that between 2014-2023 the number of days recording 28°C in the UK had more than doubled, while those over 30°C had tripled compared to 1961-1990. The BBC’s Chief Climate Headbanger Justin Rowlatt adds even more to the gaiety of the nation by reporting a Met Office claim that there has been a 40% increase in “pleasant days”, and these are defined as 20°C and above. “These changes may sound positive, but the UK’s shifting climate represents a dangerous upheaval for our ecosystems as well as our infrastructure”, he extrapolates.
The daily maximum high, along with the minimum low, is a key number in calculating average temperatures and is behind the Met Office’s ubiquitous claims of ‘hottest ever’ days. If the automated sensors, which move much quicker than the old liquid-in-glass thermometers, catch brief exaggerated spikes rather than true ambient air temperatures, then the outlier information will end up corrupting all the daily, monthly, annual and decadal averages. Eventually some of this information will end up in global datasets and will help exaggerate the rate of recent cyclical global warming.
Extreme examples of heat spikes are not uncommon. On May 1st last year, the Met Office claimed its station in Kew Gardens recorded a temperature at 2.59pm of 29.3°C. Promoted by the BBC, this was said to be the highest temperature ever recorded for this day in the UK. But the temperature was a massive 2.6°C higher than that recorded at 2pm and no less than 0.76°C above the figure recorded a minute later on the hour. Minute-by minute changes in temperature would not have been picked up in the past, and it is for that reason that the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) recommends averaging electronic measurements over five minutes to standardise data and minimise short-tern ‘noise’. For some inexplicable reason, despite playing a major part in WMO deliberations, the Met Office does not appear to want to follow this sensible scientific advice.
At the Rothamsted control site, the vast majority of the half a million readings vary minute-to-minute with individual differences in a range between –0.15 to 0.25°C. Most of the individual changes from the previous hour were to be found between –0.35°C and 0.45°C. As the graph below shows, the majority of the readings in this band showed considerably less divergence from the hourly recordings.
It is hardly a surprise that heat spikes blot the Met Office’s temperature collection programme throughout almost all its nationwide network. A recent Freedom of Information request by the Daily Sceptic revealed that Classes 4 and 5 have increased significantly over the last 18 months, and now total an appalling 80.6% of the entire network of nearly 400 stations. Pristine Class 1 sites such as Rothamsted with no uncertainties are just 4.9% of the total, and in the last 18 months they have fallen in number from 24 to 19.
But what is worse is that the Met Office does not appear to appreciate the scale of its problem, with higher class sites blighted by unnatural heat sources whether it be from jet aircraft, main roads, solar farms, electricity sub stations or tall glass-clad buildings. Little effort seems to have been made to improve matters. Over the last 18 months, 20 new sites appear to have been opened with an astonishing 67.7% starting life in the Class 4/5 junk lane. Why on earth would a reputable science body do that, some might ask. Conspiracy enthusiasts are unlikely to be short of uncomfortable suggestions.
The importance of Huxter’s work in bringing clarity and reality to the Met Office temperature claims should not be underestimated. His work makes it crystal clear – the UK Met Office does not possess a nationwide temperature measuring network that is capable of determining daily, monthly or annual highs and averages to within one hundredth of a degree Centigrade. Neither should it be using these data for the temperature computer modelling it does at non-existent sites using ‘well-correlated neighbouring stations’. Much of its temperature measuring effort is corrupted by figures that give a fake reading of true ambient air temperature. It has allowed its network to become corrupted over the years with urban heat and it has failed to make allowances for changes in measuring devices. Activists at the organisation should stop weaponising all these dodgy data for political Net Zero purposes, or the good name of the Met Office, built up over decades since Victorian times, runs the risk of becoming severely tarnished.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Global temperature anomalies on both land and sea are dropping like a stone. Net Zero-obsessed mainstream media, science and politics do not do cooling. Confirmation bias that holds humans responsible for hockey-stick style global warming with all its risible ‘settled’ notions has gravely damaged genuine climate science. But the world is cooling rapidly and the silence from the mainstream is both laughable and disgraceful.
Global temperature anomalies on both land and sea are dropping like a stone. Net Zero-obsessed mainstream media, science and politics do not do cooling. Confirmation bias that holds humans responsible for hockey-stick style global warming with all its risible ‘settled’ notions has gravely damaged genuine climate science. But the world is cooling rapidly and the silence from the mainstream is both laughable and disgraceful.
Exhibit 1: The accurate UAH satellite record shows the plunge clearly with the difference or anomaly from the 1991-2020 average falling during 2025 to end the year at just 0.3°C.
Needless to say, mainstream media ignore satellite temperature data. In January 2022 at the height of the Greta climate hysteria, Google AdSense banned a page promoting the monthly update on the grounds of publishing “unreliable and harmful claims”. In the UK, the stone-dropping global inconvenience was passed over recently in favour of highlighting the latest hooey from the Met Office claiming another local ‘hottest year evah’ based on its junk, unnaturally heat-ravaged weather stations. Rather than advance a balanced global view (or even mention it), the Met Office activists proclaimed that its six hundredth of a degree centigrade ‘record’ was made 260 times more likely due to humans fiddling with the weather. Such imaginative precision from such junk data is a wonder to behold. Science, it is not.
The UAH scientists, Dr Roy Spencer and Professor John Christy, also produced results showing how the monthly temperature anomalies have fallen over the last two years. The table below shows both a global figure and measurements broken down in a number of regions.
To the left, the red global anomaly in April 2024 was a two-year high, as was the figure next to it for the northern hemisphere. The other columns continuing from the left are the southern hemisphere, tropics, mainland US, the Arctic and Australia. Across all regions, a downward trend can be clearly seen.
Exhibit 2: Along the equatorial Pacific Ocean, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have been falling for months. In its recent report on the formation of El Niño (warming) and La Niña (cooling) oscillations, the US weather service NOAA provides the latest three-month running anomalies. Since last September, NOA notes “below average SSTs persist across most of the equatorial Pacific”.
Note the warming oceans around 2015-16 caused by a particularly strong El Niño. The recent El Niño also caused warmer oceans, or ‘boiling’ to accurately report the sentiments loudly bloviated by the Guterres/Gore/Kerry gang.
This is the latest graph showing SSTs from 60°S to 60°N.
Again, it seems temperatures are coming off the boil, with 2026 starting cooler than 2025, which was cooler than 2024.
The last few years have witnessed extraordinary climatic events combined with astonishing levels of scientific disinterest in the causes of them. The ‘agreed’ answer of course was always to hand – it was humans wot did it, we have the computer models to prove it. And if you don’t agree with us, then don’t slam the door behind you. Writing recently on Judith Curry’s blog, Javier Vinos wrote that what he termed the 2023 event revealed the “greatest failure of climate science”. Vinos is a leading proponent of the suggestion that the massive underwater Hunga Tonga volcano eruption in 2022, which increased water vapour in the upper atmosphere by up to 13%, was the prime cause of all the weather anomalies. Water vapour is a powerful warming gas of relatively short duration.
The scale of the massive increase in stratospheric water vapour can be seen in the latest measuring chart from NASA shown below. There is still a lot of extra water compared to the years before 2022, but it is gradually decreasing.
Activists jumped on all the unusual weather events to promote a politically acceptable, pre-defined narrative. But the large blips since 2023 cannot be explained by anthropogenic causes since such changes if they occur are small, regular and only noticeable over a long period of time.
The reason climate science in general has failed to rise to the discovery challenge over the last few years, observes Vinos, is due to strong confirmation bias. “The first step to learning from the 2023 event is accepting its exceptional nature, which many fail to do,” he argues. Rather than trying to determine the causes of the event, scientists have attempted to fit it into the dominant narrative using models, he charged. Vinos’s contribution makes interesting reading and offers a convincing argument to lay much of the blame for the recent dramatic but temporary climate changes on an event unique in the recorded record. Unlike Hunga Tonga, most onshore volcanic eruptions emit large quantities of particles into the atmosphere which can lead to temporary but noticeably global cooling. Meanwhile, Vinos states that “climate science has failed the test of an externally forced natural climate event”.
The great tragedy of the settled climate science era, now facing increased scrutiny, is the draining of public confidence in once revered scientific institutions. Covid was hardly a high point in medical science, while climate fear mongering is in danger of becoming a social joke. ‘Boiling’ oceans and constant risible records are mixed with obvious pseudoscience such as human ‘attribution’ claims. The blast from Hunga Tonga may well help in blowing away much of this fake news for good.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
A bitter row has broken out following Dr Roy Spencer’s backing of the UK Met Office’s controversial temperature record amid accusations of Met Office bias and poorly sited weather stations.
A bitter row has broken out following Dr Roy Spencer’s backing of the UK Met Office’s controversial temperature record amid accusations of Met Office bias and poorly sited weather stations.
Dr Spencer asserts that his simple bias reduction modelling of daily high (Tmax) and low (Tmin) UK summer temperatures over the last 65 years produces variations in average temperature “essentially identical” to those published by the Met Office. But there are those who point out that coming to the same conclusion by using two different ways to measure the same faulty data doesn’t alter the fact the data are faulty in the first place.
Ray Sanders, who has undertaken a forensic examination of almost all the Met Office’s 400-plus nationwide temperature measuring sites, is unimpressed, calling Spencer’s findings, “a load of twaddle”. Speaking to the Daily Sceptic, he added: “The whole point is that you can torture numbers as much as you want, but if they were no damn good in the first place, they will never get any better.”
His criticism strikes at the heart of Dr Spencer’s work. Spencer argues that a measuring station can be placed in a non-natural, anomalously warm urban environment, but as long as that environment stays the same over time, “it can probably still be used for climate change monitoring”. He went on to state that it “might be” that there has been little additional urban heat warming in London over the last 200 years, something that seems highly unlikely given that the city has grown in the period from a low-rise centre with numerous surrounding small villages to a major metropolitan area full of everything from tall glass buildings to airports. Sanders says that Dr Spencer’s opinions on UHIs (Urban Heat Islands) are “risible”. Simply saying things were bad in the past so they can be compared to now – with the caveat of ‘if things haven’t changed’ – is irrelevant, he states.
Spencer’s model starts with a baseline of three sets of data from sites that are said to have a 126-year continuous temperature measuring record. They are the Central England Temperature Series (CET), a group of three stations, Armagh and Stornoway Airport. This is the first problem. The CET has shown a number of station changes in that period, while the Stornoway record was compiled at another site nearly three miles away until its re-location to the Airport in 1968. Spencer’s high/low calculations go back to 1960 so the Stornoway move, unhelpfully not identified by the Met Office, will likely affect his figures.
The current CET portfolio includes two CIMO Class 4 site with international unnatural ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C, a junk classification also shared by Armagh and Stornoway. In addition, Paul Homewood has discovered that the Met Office has retrospectively cooled the near past and boosted CET readings from the last 20 years. Sanders has done considerable research on all the junk stations and dismisses them as “truly crap sites of incredible bad provenance”. For good measure, he notes that the Armagh weather station used to be housed in a metal box bolted to the side of a building by a first floor window.
Once he has established his initial baseline, Spencer incrementally adds further stations which adjusts the overall composite average. Each time a station is introduced he adds or subtracts its average difference (the bias) over the overlapping years until it lines up with the baseline. Further and better particulars can be obtained from his original article here. This method assumes long-term biases at each station stay mostly the same over time and using that assumption seems to produce the same warming trends as the Met Office. The uncharitable thought, ‘garbage in, garbage out’ springs immediately to mind.
Something that does not seem to have been considered in Spencer’s work is the effect of the change over the last few decades of measuring devices from liquid in glass manual thermometers to automatic electronic systems. This is a largely unaddressed issue in meteorological science but it is highlighted in recent work compiled by Dr Eric Huxter. Looking at the daily Tmax published by the Met Office throughout last May, he found that on average about 0.89°C was added to the maximum recording by temporary and most likely unnatural blips that would not have been picked up by slower-reacting glass bulb devices. Dr Huxter has told the Daily Sceptic that he is confident that electronic devices are biased to recording higher Tmax temperatures, especially given siting issues.
Since the Met Office picks up its daily Tmax from the one minute record, one way to remove some of the distortion would be to average the high over a longer period. Thus the national record declared at RAF Coningsby on July 19th 2022 at 3.12pm falls from a 60-second spike of 40.3°C to a five-minute average of 39.96°C. Over 10 minutes, a possible time frame for movement in liquid in glass bulb thermometers, the fall is 0.5°C. Still hot of course, but not BBC-ready ‘record’ headline hot.
Dr Roy Spencer is a brilliant sceptical scientist who is behind the valuable UAH satellite temperature record – an uncorrupted series that since 1979 shows less global warming than (frequently-adjusted) global surface datasets. He is one of the authors of the excellent climate report published recently by the US Department of Energy that has helped push back the notion of ‘settled’ political science. He is also an authority on urban heat island corruption. In a recent peer-reviewed paper with fellow Energy Department report author Professor John Christy it was calculated that the UHI effect accounted for about 22% of the observed summer warming across all US stations since 1895. For some of the suburban and urban locations – stations that Ray Sanders might refer to as “crap” – the UHI warming bias was no less than 65%.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
I would like to wish all my readers a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous, sceptical New Year. I am enormously encouraged by all the support you give me during the year and the fantastic contributions that some of you make when you respond to the publication. Your input often leads me to think harder and sometimes follow up leads that I had not previously considered. Such support and contributions are a great help to those of us who labour at the copy face. Thank you.
In a couple of weeks’ time, the Met Office is likely to announce another ‘hottest year evah’ in the UK. The message will be broadcast faithfully by trusted messengers in mainstream media, keen to prop up the fading Net Zero fantasy, but greeted with howls of derision across social media. Eye-opening investigative research over the last two years has revealed a national temperature network mainly composed of ‘junk’ inappropriate sites and massive data inventions across over 100 non-existent stations.
In a couple of weeks’ time, the Met Office is likely to announce another ‘hottest year evah’ in the UK. The message will be broadcast faithfully by trusted messengers in mainstream media, keen to prop up the fading Net Zero fantasy, but greeted with howls of derision across social media. Eye-opening investigative research over the last two years has revealed a national temperature network mainly composed of ‘junk’ inappropriate sites and massive data inventions across over 100 non-existent stations. Now the British Government has stepped in with the suggestion that questioning the Met Office’s shoddy measuring systems “weakens trust in science”. Misinformation is said to have proliferated on “conspiracy networks”.
Step forward Lord Patrick Vallance, the former Government Chief Scientific Adviser at the heart of the Covid lockdown panic but now an unelected Science Minister in the Labour Administration. “There has been a growing online narrative in some online and social media spaces attempting to undermine Met Office observations and data,” he observes. Vallance’s conspiracy claims echo similar comments made earlier in the year by the Met Office. The investigative efforts of a small number of people were said by the state meteorologist to be an “attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world ‘s changing climate”.
Only in the world inhabited by Vallance and the Met Office can a conspiracy be whipped up when rigorous examination and questioning is applied to scientific data. From Covid to climate, it seems the scientific process is a closed book to state scientists following the settled political narrative. One of the ‘conspirators’ is citizen sleuth Ray Sanders, who has undertaken a forensic examination of nearly 400 individual Met Office recording stations. Commenting on the official ministerial response, he observed that not one word constituted a scientific approach. “It is a political monologue of the lowest order,” he opined.
Regular co-conspiratorial readers will of course be aware of the reporting problems at the Met Office. Over the last 18 months, the percentage of sites in junk CIMO Classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ due to nearby unnatural obstacles of 2°C and 5°C respectively has climbed from 77.9% to over 80%. In that period, the number of pristine Class 1 sites capable of measuring an uncorrupted ambient air temperature over a large surrounding area has fallen from 24 to just 19. Ray Sanders has catalogued most of the unsuitable sites producing measurements taken by airport runways, in walled gardens, near main roads and in the middle of solar farms. Daily high unnatural heat spikes, amplified by the recent introduction of more accurate electronic devices, are an obvious unaddressed problem, but they are often fed into the official statistics. One such 60-second spike in July 2022 pushed the temperature at RAF Coningsby up to 40.3°C, a declared national record that is widely publicised.
Meanwhile, temperature databases are awash with non-existent stations and invented data. Explanations that the ‘estimates’ are taken from ‘well-correlated neighbouring stations’ might be more convincing if those stations could be identified. Freedom of Information (FOI) efforts by Ray Sanders seeking such details have been dismissed as “vexatious” and “not in the public interest”. The picture has emerged of a very rough-and-ready network, suitable for specific local temperature reporting at places such as airports, but unconvincing in promoting widespread average temperatures down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade.
The Vallance explanations are contained in a letter written to the Conservative MP Sir Julian Lewis following concerns raised by Derek Tripp, a local councillor in his constituency. He notes that in September, the Met Office decided to remove estimated data from three non-existent stations on its historic temperature database. “They recognised that confusion could be caused when there appears to be a continued flow of data on this website from stations that have closed,” he said.
In fact, the confusion was caused by the Daily Scepticseeking FOI details in November of well-correlated neighbouring stations responsible for data at one of the stations, namely Lowestoft. The well-correlated explanation is often used by the Met Office and formed the basis of an earlier ‘fact check’ by Science Feedback that seems to have relied exclusively on text provided by the Met Office. Sanders had earlier determined that there were no such stations within a reasonable distance of Lowestoft. The Met Office admitted under FOI that it did not use such stations but rather made estimates using its HADUK-Grid. This was little more than passing the buck since HADUK-Grid inputs temperature information from nearby stations, none of which it seems can ever be identified.
Vallance went on to note that the historic dataset was for “general interest only and is not intended for climate monitoring purposes”. Curiously, Vallance failed to point out that this was a very recent explanation since it only appeared on the Met Office historic page after the Daily Sceptic submitted its FOI.
On the 80% junk nature of the Met Office’s temperature sites, Vallance rushes to the aid of the party. “It is misleading and inappropriate to interpret the CIMO classifications in isolation to question the quality of the Met Office’s observing network or the integrity of the UK’s climate record,” he states. What pompous piffle. In-house activists have been allowed to leverage the reputation of the Met Office to produce a flood of dubious measurements and statistics designed to create mass climate psychosis with the aim of promoting a hard-Left Net Zero agenda. The World Meteorological Organisation could not be clearer in stating that a CIMO Class 1 location can be considered as a “reference” site giving a true air temperature over a wide surrounding area. “A Class 5 site is a site where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area,” it notes. A site with a poor class number can still be valuable for a specified application, it adds.
In other words, a Class 5 is useful for giving jet pilots a vital runway temperature, but less so for telling us that the annual temperature in the UK was 0.06°C cooler in 2023 than the ‘record’ year of 2022.
Vallance also claims that the Met Office “follows a structured, requirements-driven process to identify and establish new land observing stations”. It is reasonable to ask what “requirements-driven” process is being used by the Met Office, given that a large majority of sites started over the last 30, 10 and five years are to be found in the junk 4 and 5 Classes. Even worse, the Daily Sceptic has disclosed using FOI information that 20 new sites have opened since April 2024, and of the 17 that have received CIMO classifications, a frankly incredible 64.7% started life in the Class 4 and 5 junk lane.
And they say we are the conspiracy nuts.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
The next two weeks of COP30 will see three favourite climate scares relentlessly broadcast to promote the fast-fading hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. They are: breaching a 1.5°C global ‘threshold’ leading to runaway temperatures; human-caused tipping points producing unimaginable natural disasters; and attribution of single-event bad weather to the use of natural hydrocarbons. The 1.5°C figure is a meaningless number invented by politicians and activists to concentrate Net Zero minds; tipping points are climate model codswallop; and ditto attribution crystal ball-gazing.
The next two weeks of COP30 will see three favourite climate scares relentlessly broadcast to promote the fast-fading hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. They are: breaching a 1.5°C global ‘threshold’ leading to runaway temperatures; human-caused tipping points producing unimaginable natural disasters; and attribution of single-event bad weather to the use of natural hydrocarbons. The 1.5°C figure is a meaningless number invented by politicians and activists to concentrate Net Zero minds; tipping points are climate model codswallop; and ditto attribution crystal ball-gazing. None of them are backed up by credible scientific evidence and observation. Which of course is why political elites have trashed the scientific process of inquiry, banned and cancelled any dissenting discussion and declared the matter ‘settled’.
The foundation scam is temperature. The world is said to be warming dramatically, leading to tipping points and worsening extreme weather. Changes are said to be occurring at unprecedented rates and are caused primarily by humans increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. In fact the temperature rise is small, about 1°C over 200 years (making allowance for all the fake temperature estimates and urban heat-ravaged measurements) and similar rises are commonplace in both the historical and paleo record. The recent ‘hottest evah’ rises have been seen in the past – sudden changes in temperature are caused by sudden local events such as volcano eruptions. As it happens, the underwater Hunga Tonga volcano released vast quantity of water vapour into the upper atmosphere in 2022, a ‘greenhouse’ warming event that would have been helped along by a recent strong El Niño oscillation. Recent accurate satellite measurements show the overall global temperature has been falling during 2025.
Don’t take my word for all this natural movement. Professor Mark Maslin is a Professor of something termed Earth Systems Science at UCL and one of the authors of a recent tipping point report timed for COP30. This particular computer model-based bilge suggested that warm water corals may already be crossing their “thermal tipping points”, despite the fact that coral has been around for hundreds of millions of years and survives in waters between 24-32°C. This would appear to be the same Mark Maslin who as a humble geography lecturer in 1999 wrote a paper that said possibly most of the large climate changes involving movements of several degrees occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, “and perhaps even a few years”. These days he whines that “Earth is already becoming unliveable”, while climate change politics helps build “a new political and socio-economic system”. In 2018, he was one of a number of eco-activists who signed a letter to the Guardian saying they would no longer “lend their credibility” by debating climate science scepticism.
No wonder people like Maslin – needless to say a BBC regular on all learned climate Armageddon matters – walked away from climate science debate. Tying CO2 levels to rising temperatures to make Left-wing political capital relies on observations from just a few recent years. Widen the observations out to hundreds and then hundreds of millions of years gives a different picture. Sometimes temperatures rise and fall at the same time as CO2, sometimes not. Sometimes even CO2 levels rise before the following temperatures, more often than not they don’t. The simple explanation that warming gases such as CO2 become ‘saturated’ once they pass certain concentrations, with heating falling off a logarithmic cliff, is a scientific hypothesis or opinion, but it has much to offer when past observational evidence is considered.
Let us consider some of these observations starting with the long-term record over 600 million years. The graph below shows wide temperature-CO2 divergence.
Over 600 million years it is difficult to observe any general lockstep connection between temperature and gas. It might, however, be noted that over 600 million years, CO2 has generally been declining in the atmosphere to the near denuded levels seen today. As we have seen over the last 40 years even small rises in CO2 lead to significant planet-wide biomass growth. All that CO2 was good for the dinosaurs who roamed the Earth until 66 million years ago, with levels more than three times higher than today. The little extra has also been good for humans since recent crop yields have soared and helped to alleviate naturally-occurring world famine.
These records of course are very long term and are compiled from proxies with accuracy only to a few thousand years. In the more immediate record we find additional and conclusive proof that CO2 is not the main climate thermostat. Temperatures in medieval times were similar to today, possibly slightly higher in the Roman period and often 3-4°C higher in the Holocene thermal maximum around 8,000 to 5,000 years ago. During these periods, CO2 was remarkably stable around 260 parts per million, a mark that is in fact dangerously low to sustain life on Earth. The notorious Michael-Mann-1,000-year temperature ‘hockey stick’ removed the linking problem by abolishing the medieval warming period and the subsequent little ice age that ran up to around 1800.
Remarkable recent scientific evidence has emerged to suggest that abrupt rises in temperature have been a feature of the global climate going back to the iceless Jurassic period over 150 million years ago. Dramatic temperature changes based on 1,500-year cycles, as the younger Maslin can testify, have been known to have occurred in Greenland and the North Atlantic. But a group of French scientists led by Slah Boulila from the Sorbonne found large temperature hikes going back millions of years across the globe. The scientists noted warming up to 15°C within a few decades, “pointing to abrupt and severe changes in Earth’s past climate”. The 1,500 year cycles are often called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events after the scientists who discovered them. Some scientists have downplayed the initial DO findings and suggested the short term temperatures rises of around 1.5°C were caused by specific northern hemisphere oscillations of ice sheets and surrounding waters.
However, the French scientists note: “The 1,500-year cycle is documented in both hemispheres, in other oceans and in continents.” Their work is said to support the global nature of DO-like events, and in particular that their potential primary cause is independent of ice sheet dynamics. Meanwhile, scientific evidence continues to grow indicating much higher temperatures a few thousand years ago. One recent paper found the plant Ceratopteris had grown 8,000 years ago at 40°N in northern China, suggesting winter temperatures 7.7°C higher than today. Another found types of molluscs surviving in the Arctic Svalbard 9,000 years ago that indicated temperatures were 6°C warmer.
The current Net Zero fantasy rests on catastrophising tiny temperature rises that frankly are not even measured properly, demonising CO2 boosts that are helping Earth return to a more healthy biosphere and atmospheric balance, inventing ‘tipping points’ using junk computer models and insulting the intelligence with untestable tales claiming humans are making the weather worse.
And they call us sceptics the ‘deniers’.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
This is not supposed to be happening, according to the climate models.
Symbol image: NASA
While the headlines relentlessly holler about “exploding global warming” and “dramatic melting” of the polar caps, the South Pole is telling a starkly different story.
On October 15, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station registered an astonishing temperature of minus 61.3 degrees Celsius and it isn’t even winter there. It’s springtime and temperatures should be on the rise.
Coldest October since 1981
According to Report 24, the numbers are clear: It was the coldest October measured at the station since 1981.
This extreme cold is not an isolated event. As the article points out, even CNN reported in 2021 that the continent had experienced its coldest winter since records began.
The data from stations like Amundsen-Scott, Vostok, and Dome C show that instead of a linear, CO₂-driven heating trend, the South Pole is dominated by naturally occurring, extreme temperature fluctuations, including pronounced cold snaps.
Natural factors dominate
This directly contradicts the dominant narrative that “extreme heat is the new normal” and challenges the core assumption that the trace gas CO₂ is the overwhelming, all-determining factor in our climate system. Climatological mechanisms like stratospheric waves, polar vortex stability, and cloud cover appear to be the actual drivers of weather events.
Even growing colder
For decades, we’ve been told that polar regions would experience the strongest warming. Yet, the Antarctic region has stubbornly resisted, in some parts even growing colder.
The Report 24 article argues that this recurring cold record is a “nail in the coffin of the CO₂ dogma.” If carbon dioxide were truly the dominant climate control knob, such an extreme, decades-long cold minimum shouldn’t be happening.
The underlying models—like the IPCC forecasts from the 1990s—have systematically overestimated temperature trends. When faced with such real-world deviations, one must ask: are the climate models flawed, or is the CO₂-centric theory of climate incomplete?
For those politicians and policymakers who are basing sweeping, economy-altering decisions on the idea that the “science is settled,” the stubborn cold of the South Pole presents a critical challenge that can no longer be ignored.
Despite the fact that spring is currently turning into summer at the South Pole, temperatures have dropped to their lowest levels in the past 40 years. 🥶 On October 15, 2025, the Amundsen–Scott Station at the geographic South Pole recorded a temperature of –61.3 °C at 07:00… pic.twitter.com/tQAMD6uBTO
After strong decreases from the 2015 El Niño and the 2022 Tonga eruption, Antarctic sea ice continues to recover. Its extent in September was 0.5 million km² higher than last year and 0.75 million higher than in 2023. Models cannot explain this recovery.https://t.co/HxnYTGXIHMpic.twitter.com/YcJewcWzqF
The NASA GRACE satellite, "indicates that between 2002 and 2020, Antarctica shed approximately 150 gigatons of ice per year." That sounds like a lot but let's compare that to the total amount of ice in Antarctica, which is 25,000,000 gigatons. So, at the current pace, it will… pic.twitter.com/82Ss8ZkdMO
— Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki (@MatthewWielicki) March 12, 2025
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