Why is the Met Office adopting the language of climate alarmism? – Watts Up With That?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Cunningham

It’s about time the legacy media criticised the Met Office!

Matt Ridley in the Telegraph:

I gather it’s been hot down south. My sympathies. As Londoners were sweltering, we had a chilly breeze off the North Sea in Northumberland. The UK Met Office says it is “virtually certain” that June (the hottest in England since 1884, second hottest in the UK) was made hotter by human activity.

Duh! Even if temperatures were not affected by greenhouse gases, which they are, the 34.7C (94.5F) recorded in St James’s Park on Tuesday might have something to do with that weather station being a low-reliability “class 5” site with an error rating of “up to 5C”. It’s next to a very busy tarmac path. Plus, it is in the middle of a city and therefore subject to a more general “urban heat island” effect. Research by Arup reckons London’s heat island is worth 4.5C extra warmth on average. So yes, the heat is indeed partly man-made – but not necessarily in the way the Met Office means.

Besides, it’s not exactly unusual to have hot days in summer: it reached 36.7C (98.1F) in Northamptonshire in 1911.

The Met Office exists to forecast the weather. But increasingly it seems bored by the day job so it likes to lecture us about climate change. And here it seems to have been embarrassingly duped by activists. Go on its climate pages and you find a forecast for the year 2070, that summers will be between one and six degrees warmer and “up to” 60 per cent drier, depending on the region. A lot of wriggle room in those caveats, note.

Then it admits: “We base these changes on the RCP8.5 high emissions scenario.” Aha! Unbelievably, shockingly, this national forecasting body has chosen as its base case for the future of weather a debunked, highly implausible set of assumptions about the world economy that was never intended to be used this way.

Read the full story here.

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