The Strange Case of the ‘Hottest Ever’ Late August Bank Holiday

Posted on by Jaime JessopIn Uncategorized1 Minute Read

 

Yesterday morning, in eager anticipation of perhaps breaking yet another ‘hottest ever’ record on the last really hot day of the UK summer 2017 (there haven’t been many), the Met Office tweeted the following:

Alas, come the end of the day, we only managed 28.2C at Holbeach (which surprised me actually, because I’m only 7 miles from there and we barely managed 26C). This must have been pretty galling, missing a new Bank Holiday record by just two tenths of a degree. However, all was not lost. Revisionist Batman apparently came to the rescue at the last minute and the Met Office joyfully tweeted this yesterday late afternoon:

I saw this and thought, ‘what on earth. . . . ‘, or words to that effect, and promptly tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/Balinteractive/status/902238903050137604

Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Apparently, this was all a comms failure and the 28.3C record was unofficial and deemed to be ‘spurious’ and apparently, the person tweeting behind the official Met Office account didn’t know this and they went on to give the distinct impression that the 1984 record had been hastily revised, rather than the 1990 Cambridge record (not mentioned) being thrown out. I would say that was a pretty comprehensive comms failure to be honest.

Paul Homewood has written about it here. The Mail has splashed the news here so it’s now official and officially in the public consciousness – it’s been the hottest late August Bank Holiday evah! courtesy of one hot day in a summer that’s generally been pleasant but unimpressive and distinctly cool at times. Global warming innit.

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31 Comments

  3. The rule about revising the past used to be that you had to do it far back, when credible reasons could be found (unreliable instrumentation etc.) and no-one from the period was around to contradict. If they’re going to knock off a whole degree from 1984, what’s to stop them doing the same thing to 2017 in a few decades time? And if Sir Richard Betts (Met. Office, retd.) is accused by his replacement of being an incompetent idiot in thirty years’ time, will he sue?

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  4. This is unparalleled bunkum. If you eff up a previous temperature recording, there is no way you can QC-massage it to get a ‘true’ temperature out of the same reading. It is just one data point. Met Office is worse than NOAA at this point, with their ‘record’ temperature nonsense, sorry.

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  5. Responses so far have been pretty pathetic.

    This reminds me of the incident post-climategate, where instead of addressing any of the issues raised, the cli-sci community sent out a hurried note about how excellent and sound their work was.

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  6. They just don’t get it do they. The Met Office tweet an eager sounding anticipation of breaking another heat record. They are fully aware that the public associate these ‘records’ with increasing temperatures in general and thus with (man-made) climate change. They also know if they beat some totally inconsequential record, it will nevertheless end up in the press, reinforcing the message of warming in the public consciousness. But they rather screwed up this time because the ‘record’ which they were hoping to beat was not beaten and furthermore it turned out to be ‘unreliable’ and the not so bright person in the driving seat of the official Twitter account gave the impression that the disgruntled Met Office simply revised the old record downwards by 1.1C – et voila!

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Well, perhaps Richard Betts and other gurus at the Met Office are simply jealous of the limelight being garnered stateside by Mann’s claim that the dreadful floods in Houston are the consequence of (wait for it!) “unrestrained climate change”. But perhaps such a claim naturally follows Mann’s “unrestrained” hockey stick!

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Really!

    What is it you denialists don’t understand about climate science?

    Are truly claiming that data measured on £10 thermometers is more accurate than the output of £200,000,000 computer games climate models?

    Shame on you!

    “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” – Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

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  11. Worth repeating the comment Clipe links to on Paul Homewood’s blog in full. The Met Office is generating fake news.

    ” Chris, Leeds permalink
    August 28, 2017 11:25 pm

    And to add to the nonsense – even taking the Met Office data at face value the late August Bank Holiday has been running only since the 1960s and higher temperatures have occurred on the last weekend/ monday of August many times previously, it’s just they weren’t a bank holiday. If you look at the list of highest temperatures recorded on each day of the year in the UK (listed on the torro.org.uk web-site) temperatures have been recorded in excess of 31c on EVERY day of August and on most days of September up to the 19th. For the current dates in August covered by this bank holiday we can see that temperatures have exceeded 33c on the equivalent dates (27th, 28th, and 29th) in either or both years 1930 and 1942. Remember also that temperatures exceeded 34c widely across England every day from 31st August to 3rd September 1906…. etc etc”

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Sorry to renew my recent rant, but for the sake of my blood pressure, could some kind soul, please please remove that repulsive picture of Al Gore from your (our) masthead?

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  14. The climaticrats are so fat and happy. They can now conjure up “new tecords” and rewrite the past record at will.
    And apparently find wide acceptance for their bit of theological data tampering.
    The climate obsession has dumbed down those we thought capable of discernment, integrity and critical thinking that too few are left to challenge this sort if corrupt claptrap.

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  15. Could I second Waterside12’s request. The thought of Al undergoing mitosal fission is just too much. I suggest a nice picture of Jaime waving her UCL degree might be a suitable replacement.

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  16. Waterside and Alan, I do apologise, I had not realised our readers were so easily offended (snowflakes?)

    We will change the featured post soon. Obviously we can’t have Jaime with a UCL degree though, because Tobis has shown quite convincingly that it doesn’t exist.

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  18. Two days later and night time temperatures in the countryside are well into single figures.

    Surely this must be a contender for the coldest ever 2nd day after the late Aug Bank Holiday?

    Liked by 2 people

  19. Insult us as much as you want sunshine, some of us have sensibilities. Did we complain when that strine-ista Brad fella perverted this fair site with his multiple imagery of Oreskes in moving sebaceous detail? No we didn’t. Instead we showed considerable restraint. A picture of a child-scaring Gore in the process of multiplying like a bacterium and suffering differential tanning simultaneously is a genuinely frightening object. Yet our genuine concern is, like in less couth websites, besmearched with the epithet “snowflake”.
    Worse still, you accept the ranting of someone I previously hadn’t heard of over an eminent UCL graduate and one of your distinguished site co-founders.
    Be ashamed, be very ashamed.

    Liked by 2 people

  20. Thanks from this old long melted snowflake Paul.
    It’s just that horrible old mug, not only scares the horse’s, I cannot enjoy my breakfast each day I visit this great website.

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  21. Wage, wage war against the lying
    and the fright. Do not go gently
    into that dark night. Fight for
    truth to data, open debate, combat
    Alynsky’s twelve rules for radicals,
    especially numero five, ‘ridicule ,
    a potent weapon,’ and numero twelve,
    ‘pick the target, personalize and
    polarize it ‘ -and they do.
    Free speech, and the history record is
    anathema, – the long war between
    open and closed society continues,
    tricksy Mann, Lewandowsly, Shukla,
    Oreskes et Al adopt Plato’s
    ‘noble’ ‘necessary ‘ lie, viz
    Bank Holiday, never let an
    opportunity go to waste,
    addjustments must be made,
    say BOM, – so the people
    will say, ‘I remember when …’

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  23. Everyone in Great Britain knows with absolute certainty that the most accurate predictor of driving rain is the approach of a bank holiday. That is why the heat and sun last Monday was a record and a harbinger of massive climate change. The Met Office were caught with their models down.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. That’s a non-explanation if ever I saw one Paul. It tells us nothing we didn’t already know. If the 28.3C Cambs record was ‘suspect’, why wasn’t it thrown out and why was it quoted as being a record by the Met Office 10 hours prior to it suddenly being rejected? The obvious inference is that the Met Office, having failed to secure an expected new late Aug Bank Holiday record, looked for an excuse to throw out the old 1984 record – which they had failed to do apparently, for 33 years – and replace it with the ‘official’ record of 1990, which, hey presto, was thus exceeded considerably by 2017. At the very least, it doesn’t inspire much confidence in Met Office data quality control. Perhaps following this debacle, Met Office staff will stop obsessing over frivolous new high temperature records and start providing us with more meaningful statistics about our weather and climate, AGW agenda-free, preferably.

    Liked by 1 person

  25. Why is 28.2C (~83F) considered a record anything? It’s not especially hot even by UK standards is it? I remember many years (60 years maybe) ago when living in England that an unusual weather system brought Saharan air straight into the UK from the South and temperatures were in the 90sF – it was before you-all started using french degrees. I doubt that was the only occasion UK temperatures were that high. Even recently I recall seeing readings that were reported as much hotter than 28.2C. So why is this moderate reading a big deal?

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  26. they (MET & TV MET Weather people) are desperate to further the hottest/wettest etc.. ever record meme, that will clutch at straws to get something each year into the public arena, hence this item in my opinion.

    They have struggled so far this year inserting the meme into UK weather so have started to show the rest of the world with big red blobs to show how really hot the world really is.

    just watch the forecasts they will do for this winter. if the UK is mild but Europe Freezes, they only show the UK weather map.

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  27. Dougie might I suggest a more benign explanation. The Met Office and its acolytes emphasize record- breaking weather because the British public are interested in it and have been long before it became tangled with climate change. Weather interests almost everyone and forms the most frequent topic of conversation – it being so variable in the UK. Being moderated by the Atlantic, weather records are both unusual and moderate (only minor changes in temperature or rain/snowfall amounts). Yet the public speculates whether a hot day might be the hottest, if a particularly windy day might have had within it the strongest EVAR wind gusts, and so on. And the MO provides confirmation or denial.
    Of course in recent decades weather records have been ruthlessly used by those promoting AGW, especially when they started promoting “extreme weather”.

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  28. @ Alan

    yes us brits are interested in the variable weather we get, but we also know a good hot summer from a crappy one, like this last one (unless you happen to live in the south east with it’s urban heat island of London & it’s nearby airports)

    you “suggest a more benign explanation” is because the public love records being broken, so the MET meet that need, sounds a bit iffy to me but if you say so.

    Bishop Hill did a post on BBC people meeting to push the AGW meme to their viewers a couple of years back (can’t give a link at present – think it is now a ebook called “the propaganda bureau”).

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  29. The Met office have released a worthwhile statistic which rather puts the late Aug hottest Bank Holiday ever record into perspective. CET for the entire month of Aug 2017 was 0.8C below the 1981-2010 mean and 0.2C below the 1961-90 mean.

    Liked by 1 person

  31. Pingback: The Strange Case of the 'Hottest Ever' Late August Bank Holiday | Climate Dispatch

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