From the Daily Skeptic
Chris Morrison
Earlier this month, the Met Office declared the UK's hottest day so far this year, with temperatures reaching 34.8C in Cambridge. The Met Office claimed it was the eleventh time since 1961 that temperatures had reached this level, with six of those recorded in the past 10 years. Needless to say, a note missing from the account is that the station at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) in Cambridge is just meters away from a large thermal power station complex.
Substations release large amounts of heat into the surrounding atmosphere, and there are even plans to capture it for commercial use. Cambridge station at Histon recently benefited from a £5 million upgrade, which included the installation of a third heat pump transformer. Aside from locations favored by the weather agency, such as international airports and solar farms, it's hard to imagine a worse place to place an instrument to accurately measure nearby, unpolluted air temperatures.
Cambridge NIAB regularly appears in the Met Office's daily local 'records'. Last year it claimed the record at the site was the highest recorded in September in the eastern region since 1949. There is temperature “uncertainty” due to local natural and unnatural influences. But how reliable is this superior rating? Google Earth's perspective suggests that questions can legitimately be raised about its effectiveness.
WMO guidelines state that any heat source in a Category 1 site must be at least 100 meters away. But the Google map above shows that 100 meters between the Histon grid and the red Metropolitan station markers is a very large distance. Even closer straight paths or roads may be considered unhelpful for making undamaged measurements. Histon’s recent expansion added a third heat pump transformer to help increase capacity.
Substations release large amounts of heat to the surrounding environment. There are even plans to capture the output of these “boilers” for commercial use. In 2021, SSE Energy Solutions and National Grid unveiled plans to use the heat generated to produce hot water and heating for homes and industrial sites. As Nathan Sanders, managing director of SSE, points out: “Power transformers generate large amounts of by-product heat as electricity flows through them. Currently, this heat is simply emitted directly into the atmosphere and is wasted.
A cynic might observe that this is not entirely wasted. It helps to raise the temperature across the Met Office measurement network – great for spreading political net zero panic and warnings. As regular readers know, the network mainly consists of WMO level 4 dump stations with an “uncertainty” of 2°C and level 5 super dump stations with possible errors of up to 5°C. Almost 8 out of 10 sites in the 380 network were labeled Level 4 and 5. Incredibly, the Met Office uses overall data to claim to be able to measure temperatures as low as one hundredth of a degree Celsius across four UK countries.
this daily skeptic Thanks to citizen journalist Ray Sanders for bringing to our attention the apparent corruption at Cambridge NIAB. Ray is a regular contributor to Paul Homewood's Blog, an excellent online publication that has long drawn attention to apparent and widespread problems on the Met Office website. Earlier this year, daily skeptic According to freedom of information requests, it was revealed that most of the radio stations were junk stations. There is now widespread interest in this scientific scandal on social media, but still little mainstream media attention. Most writers captured by the lazy net-zero narrative continue to tout heat-damaged numbers and “records”. The Met Office has so far failed to respond to growing interest in its apparently flawed temperature readings.
Thermal damage caused by substations can also be found at other sites used by the Met Office. Ray also drew our attention to the “infamous” Bingley No 2 site which has been in use since 1972.
Likewise, it is just meters away from the main city substation. Not surprisingly, in this case, it's designated Class 4 trash.
The final meteorological horror show can be watched in Amersham, where temperatures at a level 4 site were again measured just meters from the area's main substation. This site is a new site, established in 2015. Another recent Freedom of Information request revealed that more than eight of the 113 stations opened in the past 30 years were Level 4 and 5. They are all garbage stations, as they are 8 of the 13 new stations in the past five years.
Chris Morrison is daily skepticenvironment editor.
Relevant
