Man-made global warming – Are you excited about it?

Once upon a time there was The Pause.

For a decade and a half, global temperatures stopped rising, leaving climate scientists baffled. Even the Met Office published a lengthy study in 2013 into the possible reasons.

But while one team at the Met Office is scratching its head, another is busy solving the problem.

After all, if the data doesn’t support the theory, you can simply change the data.

The Met Office’s Hadley Centre, in conjunction with the disgraced Climate Research Unit at UEA, have for many years published their global temperature series known as HADCRUT3. They consider it the gold standard of datasets.

But just a year after the Met Office article on the pause, a new version has hit the market, HADCRUT4, which conveniently removes that pause.

By 2014, when HADCRUT3 was officially replaced, the new version had increased warming by about one-tenth of a degree since 2000.

https://www.woodfortrees.org/data/hadcrut3vgl/from:1990/plot/none

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/download.html

But the Met Office doesn’t stop there. In 2021, they had another cherry-pick, replacing HADCRUT4 with HADCRUT5. The new version has added almost another tenth of a degree:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut5/data/HadCRUT.5.0.2.0/download.html

Put all three series together and we can see how much of the warming since 2001 is a result of data adjustments:

The Met Office insists there are good reasons for changing their data set. They will, right?

But I’m sure that if they start looking for ways to reduce the warming trend, they will have no trouble justifying it either. After all, they could have started by excluding the influence of UHI from their data.