Beers & Beef

Hysteria is already building as we approach the next heatwave here in the UK. Some pundits are predicting a zillion degrees (inked in darkest black or blood red), and suggesting the coming heatwave may well exceed that back in 1976. Well, since I was alive in 1976, I may as well confess to it being seriously hot, and not just hot for a few days but for a few weeks.

If we do something constructive and analyse the Central England Temperature Record (HadCET) we discover that there were no less than 33 ‘hot days’ during the summer of 1976, with my quirky definition of a ‘hot day’ being one where the maximum daily HadCET temperature reached or exceeded 25°C.

Now, that’s rather a lot of super warm days, and I’m going to bet the sustained heat aspect of the infamous summer of 1976 is going to be overlooked by those whose well-paid job it is to look at these things.

Another aspect that I reckon is going to be overlooked is that the Scripps Mauna Loa global reference for atmospheric CO2 back in 1976 was down at 332.2ppm (annual average), as compared to the latest reading of 430.5ppm. That’s some 98.3ppm less, and yet 1976 still rules the UK heatwave record despite total lack of SUVs. Food for thought, maybe, as we sip our cool beers.

But there’s a subtle but important issue here that the public ideally should get their heads round, and that is the heterogenous nature of the UK mainland temperature record. How we recorded temperature back in 1976 isn’t how we record temperature today, and how we recorded temperature back in 1876 isn’t how we recorded temperature in 1976. Equipment changes, as does data capture, as does methodology, as does the surrounding environment. Nothing has stayed the same and yet the Met Office treat their historic temperature data as one continuous happy record.

Aside from urbanisation (that is largely ignored) one beef I have is the move from liquid in glass thermometers (lovely mercury jobbies in elegant housings) to pokey probes in a small plastic cases. Those mercury jobbies took a while to respond to temperature changes, and so they naturally performed a smoothing function that ironed out irregularities.

Not so with yer pokey probes that will record split-second changes of the order of milliseconds. Hence the modern data record tends to get contaminated with instantaneous blips and blops. We would expect weather bods to filter these out. Except they don’t; they declare them!

Neither do they attempt to apply algorithms that ensure modern pokey probes yield a data record that is commensurate with liquid-in-glass records of old. If they did then many of these recent record-breaking claims that hang on a fraction of a degree could well evaporate, and they can’t be having that otherwise they’d lose their substantial government funding.

Kettle On!