Lacock DCNN 5827 – A topical issue regarding Cows!

51.43120 -2.11464 Met Office assessed CIMO Class 4 Installed 1/1/1948

The issue of cows and atmospheric methane has recently moved to centre stage in the news with ARLA’s introduction of artificial chemicals into feed to reduce the cow’s allegedly problematical emissions. The BBC has typically gone into overdrive discussing Bovaer. Apparently “social media users” are some specific breed of human being that objects to unnecessary additives in their own consumption. So what does this have to do with a weather station in a sleepy Wiltshire conservation village?

Lacock is a “picture-postcard” tourist attraction village owned and administered by the National Trust. On the village outskirts is a small campus of the Wiltshire College and University which runs the surrounding farmland estate and is home to the weather station. The station is only rated a lowly Class 4 despite being on level ground, not subject to any shading and with (superficially) no extraneous heat sources surrounding. This may seem quite a harsh judgement, why isn’t it at least class 2 or possibly even better? Perhaps a closer look is in order.

Rather than consider methane emissions and their effects (if any) on the overall atmosphere, a potential more relevant aspect to Lacock’s temperature readings is that lactating cows can emit up to 1850 watts of thermal energy – 19 times greater than a fit, healthy human being. As anyone who regularly goes into fields with almost tame cows will know, the cows will regularly crowd around you. Sadly cows are frequently responsible for many more human deaths annually than bulls or other farm animals. So when the observers visit this manual station and open the screen they are likely to have attracted their own very own warming audience. There is, astonishingly, in the region of 50kW of heat crowding around the screen in the image above.

I genuinely doubt the cows will make any significant difference to temperature readings {any meteorologists feel free to offer their views on that}. My somewhat tongue-in-cheek review is to again highlight the preposterous Met Office claim of reading temperatures to the 5th decimal place of a single degree. If they really could manage that, then the PRTs readings would be bouncing up and down like yo-yos every time a 1.8kW(th) cow walked past let alone a whole inquisitive herd.

More to the point, however, is again the recurring problem of manually reporting stations only being intermittently read. Sites such as Mickleham, Hartpury College, Nettlecome and many others have poor observational records. Here from recent Freedom of Information request are the last 3 years for Lacock.

Again it beggars belief that any Government agency can feel it is acceptable (or even rational) to derive a “mean daily average temperature” from as little as 53% of full year readings as in 2023. Of 1,095 daily readings (NUM_OBS) that should have been taken over the three years just 691 were actually achieved. Are the staff and students at an agricultural College/University so unconcerned that such basic functions are not carried out?

That these absurdly distorted annual averages are allowed into the UK historic temperature record is a sad indictment of the Met Office’s unacceptable lack of diligence. And yet extreme measures based on that data ( such as feeding Frankenstein-like products to animals whose product we consume) are being promoted as a new normal. This cannot be right.