Britain’s official meteorological service appears to be making up a worrying proportion of its published temperature readings, according to a new investigation. The most serious implication is that science could beis being corrupted in pursuit of green ideology; at the very least, it shows that UK weather-recoding infrastructure is in need of a serious upgrade.
When citizen journalist Ray Sanders made Freedom of Information requests to the Met Office and visited individual stations, he discovered that 103 weather stations, out of 302 sites supplying temperature averages, do not exist. This poses serious questions about how they are being used to collect useful scientific data, which in turn is used to inform climate policy.
For instance, in his English home county of Kent, Sanders observed that half of the eight official Met Office sites are in his words, “fiction.”. While Dungeness station closed in 1986, it apparently keeps on producing rolling temperature averages to the second decimal place of a degree. Like the stations alleged to be at Folkestone, Dover, and Gillingham, it does not have a classification from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), in contrast to various other recognised and listed Met Office sites.
Online inquiries about Dover are redirected to Dover Harbour (Beach)—the “nearest climate station”—yet Dover still manages to provide a full set of rolling 30-year temperature averages. A physical visit to the official site coordinates on Dover beach takes you to a place that would be submerged by the tide on a regular basis.
According to Sanders, the Met Office “declined to advise” him exactly how ‘data’ were being derived from 103 non-existent sites (out a total of 302). He asks
How would any reasonable observer know that the data was not real and simply ‘made up’ by a Government agency?
Demanding an “open declaration” of the likely inaccuracy of existing published data, Sanders hopes “to avoid other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching erroneous conclusions.”
Taking to X, social commentator Toby Young posted:
Shocking evidence has emerged that points to the U.K. Met Office inventing temperature data from over 100 non-existent weather stations. One such ‘ghost’ station, Dungeness, closed in 1986 but still reports “observations”.
While the Met Office publishes the historical data from some of its shuttered or ‘ghost’ stations, it then continues the figures by using estimates. For instance, Lowestoft, Nairn Druim, Paisley and Newton Rigg are closed, but still report temperature estimates data. “No scientific purpose can possibly be served by fabrication,” Sanders declares.
Earlier investigations, including one by Sanders, have also queried the locations of some of the Met Office’s weather stations. Historic technological difficulties with guaranteeing a reliable electricity supply haves led to an inbuilt bias against using certain rural sites; in turn, such choices mean that the artificially raised temperatures at local microclimates such as airports, car parks, and electricity substations are included in the national average. Despite these ‘heat corruptions,’ the data continues to feed climate alarmism and inform official policy.
Sanders has now submitted his report to Labour’s science minister Peter Kyle MP.
