An Extreme (ly Nice) Summer

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By Paul Homewood

I see the BBC/Met Office are up to their extreme weather scam again! (Timed to coincide with COP27 of course):

Extreme weather events have affected most of the UK this year.

In February, there was a succession of storms, in the space of a week, with storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin bringing widespread damage and disruption.

The summer saw people flocking to beaches, with the UK experiencing its highest ever temperature on record at 40.3C (104F) in Lincolnshire.

Now that’s been followed by an unseasonably mild autumn with temperatures in Porthmadog in Gwynedd reaching 21.2C (70F) on 13 November.

BBC Wales weather presenter Sabrina Lee heads to the Met Office to find out what is going on with our unpredictable weather.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-wales-63670457?at_custom2=twitter&at_custom3=%40BBCWalesNews&at_campaign=64&at_custom4=E3755BDA-671A-11ED-B7DD-07F615F31EAE&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_medium=custom7

Their main ploy is to present a few days of hot weather as “extreme”. The same weather that brought millions out to enjoy the sun!

The BBC reporter takes a trip to the Met Office, where Helen Roberts, who apparently is a socio-meteorologist (no I don’t know either!), informs us that global warming will bring more heatwaves, but strangely forgets to mention that we will also get less of that really extreme cold weather.

And the other pathetic examples wheeled out?

A few winter storms, of the sort we see every year. Eunice, they say, was one of the worst storms to hit Britain with gusts of 122 mph. This of course is the usual Met Office disinformation, as that wind speed was recorded on the high, exposed cliffs of the Needles, where wind measurements only began in 1996. The Needles is a totally unrepresentative site, as it recorded wind speeds 40 mph higher than anywhere else in the country during that storm.

To pretend that winter storms are an example of Britain’s weather becoming more extreme is utterly dishonest, as the Met Office’s State of the Climate 2021 clearly showed that windstorms have grown less frequent and intense over the years since peaking in the 1990s.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/about/state-of-climate

And the “unseasonably mild autumn”? Neither September nor October was anywhere near record warmth.

And Porthmadog? The highest CET temperature this month has been 15.9C, but this is 2.8C lower than the record for November 18.7C set in 1946.

It is of course stretching credulity to call a mild day in November “extreme”.

It is deeply ironic that the video ends with footage of the Beast from the East in 2018. Have they not worked out that we see much less of this cold snowy weather nowadays?

There is actually one final section, where the Met Office’s Dr Rosie Oakes looks at a graph of temperature changes over the last 55 million years, and claims that we have never seen the pace of warming we see now.

If she really believes that she should be in another job, because you simply cannot detect changes over such a short period of time using the geological record. Averaging temperature changes over millennia cannot tell you what happens on a decadal time scale.