Temperatures across the U.K. have barely moved for over a decade compared to the latest 30-year average. The Met Office has, belatedly, dropped the 1980s from its trend line (unbroken red on graph above) and added in data from the 2010s. As the graph shows, the move helps highlight the flatlining trend that has been evident for some time.
Across the planet, warming ran out of steam some time ago. Both surface and satellite data show no warming for over seven years. In the U.K., last year was 0.34°C colder than 2020 and the coldest year since 2015. The 2010s were colder than the 2000s. In central England, the year was as cool as 1733, 1779 and 1779. This sort of inconvenient data has led the Met Office and most mainstream media to focus on individual weather events. They have promoted the idea that such events suggest humans are changing the climate by burning fossil fuel.
In fact surface records such as those collated by the Met Office could be over-stating temperatures by recording growing urban heat distortions. The Met Office often refers to the temperature at Heathrow airport, while some “records” have come from within cities that have grown substantially over recent times
Yesterday both the Met Office and the BBC were running some climate change guff about two warm winter days. Such stories are given considerable prominence across the BBC, while the recent news about the coldest six month winter on record at the South Pole was ignored. In his recent book Unsettled, Steven Koonin, an Energy Under-Secretary of Science in the Obama Administration, was particularly contemptuous of promoting individual weather events to make political points. Weather, he shouldn’t have needed noting, is not climate.
