After long, patient pressure by The Daily Sceptic, the British Met Office has started to withdraw fabricated temperature data, namely local daily temperature “records” from non-existent weather stations. The Met, unsurprisingly, originally insisted that the non-existent evidence was carefully made up and thus could be trusted. For instance they said figures from the Lowestoft station that actually closed in 2010 were generated from “well-correlated neighbouring stations”. And you might be wondering how you could correlate data you have with data you don’t. But it would be the wrong question because, we now learn, “there were no such operations within a 40-mile radius.” Oh darn. They really were caught, they really were embarrassed and, after exhausting the alternatives, they really seem to have started to do the right thing. Alas, they still report data from about 100 other stations that do not, um, exist. And they wonder why no one believes them anymore.

Most people do not go about thinking to themselves “I wonder if the temperatures on the government website are invented.” Not because they are all credulous about the state’s competence and purity. It’s just not the sort of thing that looms large in their lives, and especially if all the media outlets blare about “hottest summer ever” they assume that if something were fishy someone paid to keep them informed would have checked it out. But at some point, and partly because there really is an inherent human desire to want to be decent, along with some less attractive inherent desires, people caught in a scandal want to purge themselves even if not facing immediate ruin. If, for instance, they publicized four stations near Lowestoft to demonstrate their integrity and someone observed that they too were all closed.

Activists and advocates may bluster. Including journalists. Hence the AP headline back in July “The US faces more frequent extreme weather events, but attitudes and actions aren’t keeping up”. See, people are stupid. They don’t notice. Nobody’s listening. But we’re right:

“Experts say climate change is intensifying extreme weather events, making them more frequent and severe, but our attitudes and actions haven’t kept up. Recent flash floods in Texas highlight this trend.”

Instead the fact that there is no trend in flash floods in Texas, over decades, centuries and even millennia, gradually pushes these people out the back side of their trenches.

The same is true of bogus temperature data, and not just in Britain. Despite much that has gone wrong in the UK of late, it remains one of those nations with a comparatively excellent public service including when it comes to tracking, recording and publicising data. As is the United States. But, as The Daily Sceptic also points out, other skeptical researchers including Anthony Watts have discovered that a scandalously high proportion of NOAA reporting stations produce “ghost” data on account of being, um, deceased.

Then there’s the problem on which Tony Heller has been particularly vocal of… what’s this? Yup. Non-existent stations again. But not of the modern kind where they say we’re reporting data from a specified place in detail and it’s not there. Rather, when they compare temperatures today to those a century ago, or more, Heller continually reminds us that we do actually know where the reporting stations were in the mid-twentieth century, the early twentieth century, the late 19^th and so forth back at least to around 1800, after which the answer is that there were almost none and they were all in England and the U.S. And even after 1800, until well after the Second World War, there just weren’t stations in most of the world and nobody even pretends there were.

What they do pretend is that they have data anyway. Which they got by programming a computer to calculate data from back then when it was cooler, and compare it to now when it’s warmer, and the computer did and said hey, it was cooler back then. But that result only proves that they’re using made-up data to support a theory that doesn’t hold up well in the face of the real kind. And sooner or later, that kind of thing gets exposed and ridiculed.

A defensive and often obtuse effort to brazen it out is the natural initial response especially of a bureaucratic organization. Thus the Sceptic also notes that when the invaluable Matt Ridley went after the Met for using the absurd RCP8.5 scenario, that supposedly ne plus ultra of reputable agencies denied doing so… until Ridley posted an item from the Met’s own site saying “We base these changes on the RCP8.5 high emissions scenario”. Busted.

As The Daily Sceptic noted acerbically but fairly:

“Erroneous conclusions seem to have been reached by the local council in the Welsh spa town of Llandrindod Wells. A few years ago it declared a fashionable ‘climate emergency’ at a time when the Met Office was claiming the local maximum temperatures had risen by 1.07°C relative to the period 1960 to 1990. How did it know? Last month marked the 50th anniversary of the closing of the weather station at Llandrindod Wells. Precision to within one hundredth of a degree centigrade is the product of a computer model – the disclosure of the input details of which are said to be not in the public interest.”

But when the public gets interested, it will be disclosed. And it won’t be pretty.