Met office red alert for extreme heat has been issued for London and for parts of the Midlands. This is the first ever met office red warning for heat.
Government red warnings for heat health alert now cover all of England. I think that this may be the first such alert, it is undoubtedly the first ever to affect all of England.
Are significant consequences expected for electricity generation and distribution ?
Yes its been hot.
The hottest recorded from an airfield with plenty of tarmac.
You have ask if these records are real
It depends on what you mean by "real". We have had airfields with weather stations on them since at least WWII, and some before that.
The Urban Heat dome effect produces only best guess temperatures. Its well known that poorly located temperature gauges are used.
The Urban Heat dome effect produces only best guess temperatures. Its well known that poorly located temperature gauges are used.
I would suggest that you read the Met Office's specification for weather stations (and the reasoning for it).
But it is patently true that microclimates might result in nearby locations having different temperatures. That doesn't mean the trend over many decades isn't relevant, nor that the variations are not well-understood by the clever people at the Met Office.
These are, after all, the stations used as part of the weather model for forecasting the accuracy of which has fairly substantial economic and security implications; one would expect that by now if it really was "well known" that the sites were problematic they would have been moved!
OK so 40km apart will give some spurious results so.e of which become headline news.
So from the little ice age we're warming nicely. And may get as warm as the medieval warm period. The trend over the past 2 decades is no warming.
I’m sorry but the warming over the last decades is clear and caused by human burning of fossil fuels plus meat and dairy industry. It is accepted as scientific consensus.
the climate and ecological emergency needs dealing with.
denial of the problem won’t make it go away
I think you'll find that the climate change denialists on this forum are impervious to the results of the scientific consensus regularly formed by the IPCC working groups. You'll also find a lack of coherent, sustained argument. You will read twitter tropes without end. And please don't imagine that you are necessarily engaging with human beings. There is a lot of bot-like behaviour (those twitter tropes, for example).
About a year ago, I tried to engage in technical discussion with a variety of climate-change denialists (and some climate-change sceptics) on this forum. It wasn't a waste of time, for I learned that it was pretty much hopeless. There were half a dozen prominent handles, of which about half seem to have quit with the change in SW.
First, all of them, as far as I can tell, are unfamiliar with the technical literature (except for occasional references to items linked on various denialist WWW sites). They are not familiar with standard climate science, such as the elementary exposition in Global Warming, Fifth edition, by John Houghton, and certainly not with the matter included in a university textbook such as Principles of Planetary Climate, by Raymond Pierrehumbert.
That's nominally OK, of course. You can be expert in something without having a formal qualification. But to be expert you do actually need to know what is thought to be the "standard" technical material, and you do need to be able to discuss it, whether you agree with it or not.
It turns out the deniers are also mostly unfamiliar with the social histories of many of these WWW sites (detailed in, e.g., Merchants of Doom, by Oreskes and Conway, or, more informally but UK-specific, Denied, by Richard Black). The URLs which keep coming up, and the sites' backgrounds, are discussed in those books and others.
What happened and happens in discussion here is that someone brings up a meme, with or without some URL. And then, when the meme is challenged, they say something rhetorical and change the subject. There are bots that do this, and they have been refined in particular on Twitter. I have worked - still work - with computational linguists who can build these things and I know how to do it. Now, whether the discussants that engage in this are actually bots, or whether they guide bots to do it for them, or whether they get a human thrill from mimicking a bot, is secondary. The technology is not at the point at which the bots can actually engage in meaningful technical discussion (in any scientific area). So it is all just word salad.
For example, some entity expresses doubt about recent temperature readings in the UK. You won't get that entity to engage in meaningful discussion about measuring temperature, or what spot temperature may mean, or how that spot temperature informs weather science.
In the months in which I engaged (tried to engage) with climate-change deniers on a particular thread, I can remember just three almost-forays into actual climate science. Some entity (very likely a bot) raised some comments by Richard Lindzen, in which he denied the occurrence of extreme weather events. Lindzen is a retired climate scientist, and former member of the IPCC WG1, so he has "credentials". But it takes some eccentricity to deny the increasingly frequent occurrence of "extreme weather events" in the middle of the NA West Coast heat dome event. Pretty much all of California (certainly its weather and climate scientists) and much of Western Canada would consider him nuts. And of course there is now a whole sub-discipline of attribution, resulting inter alia in Stott, Stone and Allen's famous work on the 2003 European heat wave, and now organised into the WWA consortium. Anything Lindzen may opine about lack of evidence is contradicted by the work in this sector. But a typical denier will cite Lindzen, cite his credentials, and then attempt to change the subject before the refutations can be adduced.
The work of John Christy and Roy Spencer is often cited. Their analysis for NASA of satellite measurements of temperature appeared to contradict others. That was not eccentric opinion; that was scientific inquiry of the usual sort. The discrepancies were investigated, and eventually explained as measurement errors, and correction factors derived. If all you do is name people, given their qualifications, say what they said (or wrote), and then drop the subject, as deniers do, it is easy to give an impression of continuing controversy, because of course there is genuine controversy in science, and pretty much all the time, and pretty much with every new issue. But that controversy is typically resolved over time, as it was with the initial Christy/Spencer results. As it was with the existence of gravitational waves. As it was with the existence of Higgs-boson-like elementary particles.
But note that the Christy/Spencer measurement anomaly is not resolved by amateurs and Twitter bots chatting with each other on an Internet forum. It is resolved by climate scientists doing climate science. We have universities around the world that do climate science and teach climate science, just as they teach marine biology and biochemistry and ecology. And there are standard things you have to be able to do, in order to be able to pass an elementary exam.
I could devise such an exam (but I am retired from Uni teaching, so I can't actually give one). For example, one question I would set is to take the Keeling data and extrapolate them out 10 years, 25 years, 50 years and 100 years. There is, of course, one "right" answer to the question, which we cannot know until those 100 years are past. But there are ways of extrapolating (otherwise known as reasoned guessing). You have to make (and explain) some assumptions, because without assumptions you cannot extrapolate at all. And those assumptions have to be plausible. You also have to know some numerical analysis. You have to be able to look at the curve so far and identify its salient characteristics. There is no one right answer to the question which can be given today. But there are better and worse guesses. By posing the question and hearing the reasoning, an examiner can get a good impression of what somebody knows about data analysis in climate science (or those two subjects taken separately).
So, those who want to distinguish themselves from Twitter bots here can try answering the question. When you have done it, if you have done it passably, there are more questions to follow.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/29/live-corrupted-climate-stations/
Are you really that convinced that the met Office are any better than noaa...
I agree with you - its not worth the effort responding to climate deniers. Most of them are only looking for attention anyway, the best advice is ignore them and work with the vast majority of the population who realise the climate and ecological emergency is real and needs drastic action.
Professional Engineers should be well placed to understand the science and the data and help to evaluate the options. Sadly we have wasted 40 years due to the fossil fuel companies seeding misinformation, delay, denial, greenwashing. This makes the changes needed all the more painful and drastic.
I am convinced that you behave like a Twitter bot.
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