Nice and Toasty

Britain's Climate Improves

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

Global warming has made Britain’s climate slightly more mild and pleasant. This is the shock finding of a study likely to send paroxysms of terror through the alarmist “science” establishment as it finally realises the game is up and that the evidence just doesn’t support its fantastical scare story.

The study was conducted by Paul Homewood for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  Using data from the UK Met Office — the same institution relied on by the alarmists for their scare stories — Homewood has found that global warming has made next to no difference to Britain’s climate.

His conclusion:  part from being slightly warmer, the UK’s climate appears to be little different to the past.

The study was prompted by a highly alarmist UK Climate Change Risk Assessment report, published in 2012 by the UK government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), warning that ‘climate change’ would lead to more extreme weather events in Britain.

DEFRA’s report warned:

Events such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts will become more severe. By the 2080s, average summer temperatures will rise by up to 8◦C, winter rainfall will increase by up to 70%, and summer rainfall will fall by up to 60%. Sea levels could also rise by up to 70 cm by 2095.

But Homewood’s report — titled DEFRA versus the Met Office — shows that there is no-real-world evidence to support these predictions.


Here are the Homewood study’s main findings:

• UK temperatures rose during the 1990s and early 2000s. This rise is associated with a similar increase in near-coastal sea surface temperatures. There has been no rise in the last decade.

• Seasonal temperatures have followed a similar pattern: a rise during the 1990s, but a levelling off since. • This sudden rise in UK land temperature is not unprecedented, with the Central England Temperature series (CET) showing a similar occurrence in the early 18th century.

• Analysis of CET shows that despite the rise in average summer temperatures, there has been no increase in the highest daily temperatures, or the frequency of extreme high temperatures, in recent years. In fact the opposite is true. Heatwaves were far more intense in 1975 and 1976, when there were thirteen days over 30◦C. By contrast, between 2007 and 2017 there have only been two such days. (Note that there was also only been one day over 30◦C in the summer of 2018). The highest daily temperature on CET was 33.2◦C, set in 1976 and equalled in 1990.

• According to CET, there has been a marked reduction in the number of extremely cold days since the 1980s.

• Although UK precipitation trends have been rising since the 1970s, analysis shows that this is largely confined to Scotland. In the rest of the UK, there is little long-term trend.

• Analysis of the longer-running England & Wales Precipitation Series (EWPS) shows that the higher rates of rainfall experienced in the last decade are not unprecedented.

• Seasonal analysis of the EWPS shows little trend in winter or summer rainfall since 1900. Nor is there any significant trend in spring or autumn.

• Analysis of the EWPS also provides no evidence that rainfall is becoming more extreme, whether on a decadal, annual, monthly or daily basis. There is, however, evidence that very dry years have become less common.

• Long-term sea-level rise has averaged about 1.4 mm per year, after correcting for vertical land movement. Recent rates of sea-level rise are similar to those in the first half of the 20th century. There is no evidence of sea-level rise accelerating.

• There is little long-term data available for storms, but the limited data from the UK Met Office indicate that storms have not become more frequent or stronger in the last few decades.

The study concludes:

In short, although the UK is, on average, slightly warmer than it used to be, there is no evidence that weather has become more extreme. In particular, heatwaves have not become more severe and nor have droughts. Data suggest that recent warming has had little effect on the severity of flooding in the UK. Similarly, there is little in past trends to support suggestions that average summer temperatures will increase by 8◦C, winter rainfall will increase by 70%, or that summer rainfall will fall by 60% in the next few decades. There is also nothing to support the prediction that sea levels may rise by 70 cm by 2095.

The report is highly unlikely to make any impact on the current UK government which remains committed to the disastrous 2008 Climate Change Act, introduced by its Labour predecessors, which obliges the UK to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050 — at a cost to the taxpayer conservatively estimated at £18.3 billion a year.

No one at senior levels in Theresa May government dares express a climate sceptical position — even if any of them had the knowledge base to do so, which unfortunately none of them do.