Penicuik DCNN 1644 – “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it”

The above climate averages data appears on this official Met Office webpage. This is the public face of the Met Office and will be assumed by viewers to be authoritative and accurate data – why would anyone question its validity? This post follows on from my detailed report that demonstrates that each and every of their sites contributes in some way to the above data presentation. I now question this assumed validity by exposing the major flaws in its compilation through a specific example site, though the principles I use apply to the vast majority of Met office sites.

The scientifically unbelievable quote I headlined above was made 21/2/2005 in an email from Phil Jones, Professor and Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) to Australian sceptical researcher Warwick Hughes when questioned on the “raw data” being “adjusted” in a multitude of ways. A quote worth bearing in mind whenever considering modern day authority “climate” proclamations.

Penicuik is a small town lying 14 km / 8.7 miles due south of central Edinburgh at the foot of the Pentland hills on the bank of the River Esk. The CEDA digital archives show temperature observations dating back to 1946 for Penicuik but exactly where they are from and how the area has changed is not immediately evident until one looks behind the official facade.

Interestingly if one “googles” Penicuik meteorological station you are taken to the site operated by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) which is funded by the same government department as the Met Office and extensively records weather details. It is a very well equipped and located site that represents the image the Met Office likes to portray itself as but does not conform to in most locations. This is what it looks like below – how it should be done..

“Easter Bush is located to the south of Edinburgh, close to the UKCEH Edinburgh site on the Bush Estate at Penicuik. It is co-located with an eddy covariance flux monitoring site. It is a grassland site with a typical loamy mineral soil.“

Unfortunately, the above is not the Penicuik site from which those “location specific, long term averages” were derived for and from. That honour for some (but not all) of the observations that were taken is an amateur meteorologist’s suntrap back garden at 44 St James’s Gardens, Penicuik as below.

55.823000, -3.227605 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1946 Closed 31/12/2022

This site is now recently closed but was still functioning when I first started my investigations for the Surface Stations Project. Basic site analysis is frankly dismal and the site is on a par with the very many domestic garden sites that bear no relationship whatsoever to the wider natural environment. I am compiling a list of such compromised sites in absurd micro climate sites such as domestic gardens, walled kitchen gardens, botanic and zoological gardens etc – the list is over 100 so far and growing. Deliberately modified conditions like these, with no objective control whatsoever on external activities and extraneous heat sources, are frankly risible. That the Met office is continuing to add such Junk sites to their portfolio demonstrates they are, as an organisation, unfit for purpose.

As ever with manually observed sites I checked the reliability of readings, after all, missing readings are totally useless. The record was not good considering there was not a long way for the observer to travel. The last operational year of 2022 showed 73 days worth of absent temperature measurement. 2021 there were just 21 days actually taken (i.e. 345 missing) – 2020 none were taken, an entire years absence. 2019 showed 80 missing, 2018 – 82 missing, 2017 – 102 missing even though the Met Office opted to change the maximum reading LIGT with a PRT and data logger. Suffice to say the standard of observations frequency was very poor indeed.

Going further back in time I noted a significant and unexplained gap in 1983 – why this should be, was a question I had to answer. This site was reported to have full observations dating back to 1946 as below, with no indication of a site relocation.

But, as ever, a deep dive into the small print revealed

2000-09-26

2023-01-01

SITE INFORMATION

SITE WAS AT GRID REF 3233E 6599N ELEVATION 189M UNTIL 1982

Different grid references and different elevation shown with (presumably) the original site in use from 1944 to 1982 hence the 1983 gap until the new site was established.

So where was it? Bearing in mind the installation date shown as 1944 and with digital archive temperature records from 1946 I opted to put the readings into Google Earth Pro historic images of that time to see what they brought up. Though the modern day site of the coordinates suggested a housing area, the 1945 aerial mapping shows a (black and white) rural area not dissimilar to the UKCEH site in open country at that time as below. This was not an amateur’s back garden, nor any housing at all, being then outside the built up area.

It seems hardly surprising that the original open countryside site, ultimately developed into the urban area of Penicuik and then relocated in the 1980s into a back garden site within the urban area of the town, shows a significant warming over time. In fact it would be spectacularly unlikely that such development and relocation would not instantly show warming. That the Met Office both effectively hid this relocation and then produced a seamlessly bonded dataset/timeline from 1961 to 2020 as a representative “Climate Averages” site appears (to any impartial observer) as “contrived” to say the least.

It gets worse than this. The Met Office has variously claimed “Well Correlated” nearby sites contribute to these “homogenised” figures followed by them then disclaiming this remark and ultimately failing entirely to demonstrate how such “averages” were derived or potentially “made up”. What of the other nearby “Climate Averages” stations?

These “nearest climate stations” bear neither meteorological nor historic similarity to Penicuik to such an extent as to be almost a parody of what a nearby comparative site should be. This data is supposed to represent the 60 year period from 1961 to 2020.

Starting with Kirkcaldy – at 19 miles (that is 30.6 km for anyone not versed in older used scales such as Fahrenheit!) – this site started in 1950 but offered its last readings in 1979. Of the entire 60 year climate period it only offered real world observations for 18 of them. 42 years worth of readings are formulated by devices the Met Office is either unwilling or, more probably, unable to explain.

Worse is Blackburn Sewerage Works – this site started 1/1/1971 i.e. 10 years after the start of the reporting period. It is one thing for Messrs Hollis and Perry to claim modern day “guestimation” systems for current data but supplying data even prior to site opening can surely only be described as clairvoyance a la Scole Experiment. Undeterred by closure of this quoted site 1/9/1978 (just 7 years and 9 months of life span) a further 42 years of afterlife were concocted and probably still are being. Bear in mind the Hollis/Perry paper is from 2004 thus they opted to use stations already long closed even then.

And so to Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, a site at 152 metres lower elevation that has allegedly been operational since 1926 but has actually only been in its current WALLED GARDEN location for the last 8 years. How realistic is it to compare an urban walled botanic garden @ 28 metres amsl with that original Penicuik site in open countryside @ 185 metres amsl. This is RBG Edinburgh – how representative of the wider environment is this? Officially – Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C), this site is clearly an absurdity for wider area representation but then again so are the vast majority of Met Office sites.

The final comparative is Edinburgh Goggarbank which is undoubtedly a well equipped site perfectly suitable for its intended purpose of rapidly providing readings crucial to weather forecasting. Unfortunately for climate reporting to the second decimal place it only ranks as a lowly CIMO Class 4 and in being installed in 1998 can only offer 22 years of the 60 year climate accounting period. Despite the Met Office’s total inability to demonstrate how they are currently deriving site data for specific sites it seems staggeringly improbable for them to prove how the 1961 to 1990 data for Goggarbank was derived prior to its birth.

What stations did Messrs Hollins and Perry use for this creativity before Goggarbank even existed?

To summarise, this specific example in relation to my inquiries to the Met Office to justify their creativity in providing “climate averages” demonstrates that the Met Office will not divulge their mechanisms because either they cannot or, if they could, it would leave them open to disproof of the whole exercise.

To paraphrase Phil Jones anti-science headline quote, the Met Office is saying “Why should WE make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it”. Clearly all the evidence shows there are major flaws with their “data” and they are acting in an unregulated and unscientific manner to satisfy their own ideological narrative.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2026/06/10/penicuik-dcnn-1644-why-should-i-make-the-data-available-to-you-when-your-aim-is-to-try-to-find-something-wrong-with-it/