The 3-year moving average for the season is similar to December (last Saturday’s post).

“Old” values are the same as “New” for the years 2001 to 2008 and 2019 to 2023. They are different for the ten years I downloaded from Weather Underground which were averaged and docked one-degree Centigrade to provide my first pre-Industrial baseline. The old values, in whole degrees Fahrenheit, are not available now.

The scandalous rise in temperature occasioned by offering figures to one decimal place was explained on Saturday. When the ten-year extremes are bundled with the other thirteen years, the difference drops from 0.49°C to 0.2° degrees, thereby jumping just 40% along the road to the “Paris target” rather than going almost the whole way in one leap.

However, it can’t have escaped notice that some of my pre-Industrial years coincide with the dip in the 23-year trend. I am going to create a 20-year average, from 2001 to 2020, to form a new baseline. In cahoots with the “new figures” rise, future mean temperatures above pr-Industrial may look quite different to those I have posted in the past. But climate catastrophe and net zero are looking more like conspiracy theories with each passing day. Nothing stays the same.  

One takeaway from today’s chart is that the ten warmest UK years since records began – all occurring since 2003 – are being rather coy. Maybe it is a northern England thing. The picture may be very different at the close of this meteorological year, should we get that far.

Clouds 65 · Filey