We are told that current warming is ‘unprecedented’ despite palaeoclimatology showing 10 times as rapid warming during Dansgaard–Oeschger events in the early Holocene.
If the warming is unprecedented then its impacts should be clearly seen in the temperature records, with new daily records set increasingly in modern times. How does this look in the UK record?
A baseline source for this information is
Webb J, Meaden G.T (2000): Daily temperature extremes for Britain. Weather 55(9): 298-315
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260786175_Daily_temperature_extremes_for_Britain
which has been dynamically updated for subsequent years.
The pattern shows the expected seasonal pattern, although the individual records show a significant element of variability.
Plotting the number of current records per year shows no observable pattern.
Nor does records per season.
Decade analysis shows a trend, which is not significant at 1%
The evolution of the records shows a regular distribution across time, with significant steps in the cumulative pattern.
Dividing the record evolution into 4 uniform proportions, set at 25% there is no observable pattern, nor a relationship to CO2.
25% Band CO2 CO2 Change Zero Records Interval Period no records CO2 increase per year
ppm ppm Years Years % ppm
1876 298.99
1921 307.99 9.00 16 46 4.8% 0.2
1949 313.28 5.29 3 28 10.7% 0.2
1988 350.88 37.60 11 39 28.2% 1.0
2020 413.39 62.51 7 32 21.9% 2.0
There is no relationship with the temperature of the year in which the record was set, globally nor regionally, as measured by its then rank in terms of mean annual temperature.
Chi2 tests show that the decadal distribution of years with no record is uniform is statistically significant at 1% while the distribution of number of records is not. Tested against a uniform rise in records per decade, as suggested by the global and regional temperature record, is again not significant at 1%. These two results suggest that the pattern of record setting is random and is therefore controlled by the weather conditions which allow the maximum temperature to be reached on that day rather than a systematic warming. Natural significantly variability outweighs the warming trend.
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