From THE DAILY SCEPTIC
by Chris Morrison
The UK Met Office recently declared an average daily maximum temperature of 22.3°C for June 2025 at Lowestoft: Monkton Avenue. But there is no weather station at Lowestoft and hasn’t been since 2010. Over the last 15 years, the temperature measurements published in the Met Office’s Historic Station Database have been invented, or rather estimated according to the State meteorologist with figures from “well-correlated related neighbouring stations”. This explanation might be more plausible if the Met Office could actually name the stations, presumably a simple task with the vital scientific input data readily to hand. Alas, it seems not. A number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for the identity of these well-correlated stations near Lowestoft and other non-existent stations have been denied by the Met Office quoting “vexatious” grounds. It has concluded that the “public interest factors in favour of not responding to the requests outweighed the public interest factors in favour of responding to the requests”.
The FOI requests have been made by citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders who is engaged on a detailed scientific study of the Met Office’s nationwide temperature measuring network and climate average databases. His requests for help in this work are simple and, in addition to seeking how data is inputted into non-existent weather stations – 103 at the last count – he asked why a national record of 40.3°C on July 19th, 2022 at RAF Waddington is to be found in the CEDA archives, but was not claimed at the time. Great play was made of the record 40.3°C declared at nearby RAF Coningsby on the same day, although later disclosures have shown it was a 60-second spike as three Typhoon jets were attempting to land. Sanders is not asking for anything complicated that might involve considerable work on the part of the Met Office. He is merely seeking information that should be easily obtained within the records of the Met Office.
The ‘vexatious/public interest’ suggestion is the latest dog ate my homework excuse offered by the Met Office to avoid identifying the so-called well-correlated neighbouring stations. Earlier this year, it told Sanders that the information was not actually held by the Met Office. It was claimed that “the specific stations used in regressive analysis each month are not an output from the process”. Needless to say, that nonsense failed to satisfy Sanders and you can read here details of his recent FOI requests and the Met Office’s lengthy reply.
The Met Office’s inability to produce this information will inevitably lead to speculation that the data is being invented, possibly with a political motive in mind to promote Net Zero. To head off such damaging conclusions being drawn, the State-funded Met Office needs to stop hiding behind “vexatious” excuses and treat these reasonable requests with the attention and respect they deserve. As Sanders notes, it is impossible to rationally justify any climate average figures without knowing what the relevant inputs were. If these well-correlated stations are unknown or no details retained, “then you have no proof whatsoever of the accuracy of the outputs” – outputs, it might additionally be noted, that should be removed when they are being used to promote the Net Zero fantasy.
It is hardly vexatious or not in the public interest to identify the stations currently supplying data for Lowestoft. In fact, Sanders went out of his way to explain that he was solely concerned with the details of which stations’ data are currently being used. “Obviously, as this is an ongoing process these stations must be known”, he writes. Similar inquiries have also been made about Scole, Manby, Fontmell Magna, Nairn Druim, Bodiam and Aberdaron weather stations. Answers to all of these came back none. In a long, detailed and legalistic explanation arguing why the Met Office should not provide the information, it was claimed that the “public interest test arguments were upheld”.
Sanders’ view is an obvious one – “It would have been much simpler and less expensive to actually answer my questions than go to all this rigmarole to not answer… In early August they will produce such figures for Lowestoft, Nairn Druim and Paisley (all long closed) but they will not be able to produce details of the stations used to compile such ‘data’ – does anyone really believe that? Why do they allow readings they know to be wrong to be archived? If the Met Office cannot (or will not) produce evidence to support their claims why should anyone believe them?”.
Interest in the temperature measuring activities of the Met Office has grown over the last year following revelations published in the Daily Sceptic that nearly 80% of its 380 sites are poorly located. As a result, they are subject to unnatural temperature corruptions that lead to classification ratings that come with possible ‘uncertainties’ between 2°C and 5°C. Not to exaggerate, many sites seem to measure everything except the natural ambient air temperature. Further work from Dr Eric Huxter has shown that many of the ‘extremes’ and ‘records’ claimed recently by the Met Office are due to suspicious heat spikes in junk sites picked up by recently introduced electronic devices. In addition to his work describing the lamentable state of many temperature sites, Ray Sanders has also discovered the massive estimations made for over 100 non-existent stations. Mainstream media has been slow to pick up on this story since it leads to the obvious opening of a Pandora’s Box and a questioning of the Met Office’s role in promoting a made-up climate crisis that requires an unnecessary Net Zero solution.
But with the fantasy nature of Net Zero coming to the fore, this is starting to change. The walls are slowly crumbling. On July 3rd, the distinguished science writer Matt Ridley noted in the Telegraph that the 34.7°C recorded two days before in London’s St James’s Park might have something to do with that weather station being a low reliability Class 5 site with an error rating up to 5°C. “So yes, the heat is indeed partly man-made – but not necessarily in the way the Met Office means,” he observed.
Ridley goes on to note that the Met Office seems increasingly bored by its day job of forecasting the weather, “so it likes to lecture us about climate change”. In his view it has been “embarrassingly duped by activists”. He gives the example of its continued use of the de-bunked RCP8.5 ‘business-as-usual’ scenario to make future apocalyptic predictions that summers in less than 50 years could be up to 6°C warmer and 60% drier. In his view, the Met Office is “deliberately seeking extreme predictions to scare people and so get media attention”.
Recent revelations might suggest that it is none too fussy in how it goes about achieving these desperate ends.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X
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