Climate blogger Paul Homewood is demanding that the U.K.’s national weather service clear the fog over a claim linking harsh winter weather to alleged catastrophic climate change.
A Met Office spokesman made the contention last month in the wake of Storm Isha, which slammed the British Isles January 19. Senior meteorologist Claire Nasir blamed climate change for the severe conditions and indicated a disastrous trend.
“More intense storms down to climate change, meteorologist says,” reads a BBC headline from January 22. “The ‘more intense’ storms the UK is experiencing are caused by climate change,” Nasir told the outlet.
Homewood heard Nasir’s statements that morning on the BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast broadcast. “When we see these storms, they are more intense, and that’s down to climate change,” he quotes her as saying.
Following the science, Homewood he sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Met Office, “asking for evidence supporting this claim.”
He published their response on his “Not a Lot of People Know That” blog.
“Please note that the Met Office is not able to answer your request and relies on the following exception under EIR: Regulation 12(4)(a) – request for information that is not held.”
“They even sent a link to this report to clarify the background,” writes Homewood, referring to a document entitled “Recent trends and future projections of UK storm activity.”
He posted this pertinent excerpt:
When considering recent trends in storm activity in the UK it is useful to consider two major components of storms separately: wind and rainfall. Recent data and trends in these phenomena are detailed in the 2018 State of the UK Climate Report (Kendon et al., 2019). This report found that there is no compelling trend in maximum gust speeds recorded in the UK since 1969, measured as the number of days more than 20 weather stations recorded gust speeds above 40, 50 or 60 knots. Changes in observation methods and instruments mean the data can only be reliably assessed back to 1969, while changes to the wind measurement network and the way gusts are measured mean the data should still be interpreted with caution, but there is nothing to suggest maximum wind speeds have persistently changed in recent decades. [Emphasis added.]
Elsewhere, the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate 2022 report states: “Storm Eunice was the most severe storm to affect England and Wales since February 2014, but even so, these storms of the 1980s and 1990s were very much more severe.”
Homewood is calling “on the Met Office to publish a full retraction of what is evidently a false and misleading claim.”
