Climate Data Information

Conference of the Parties Since 1995 the self-proclaimed great-and-good of the climate movement have met to discuss measures to combat climate change. The meetings have taken place every year, except for the COVID hit year of 2020. Each meeting is referred to a Conference of the Parties. The Conference of the Parties, usually shortened to COP, is the supreme decision-making body of The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It works in parallel with the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which produces regular Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) reports. The latest is CMIP6. In brief, the IPCC produce projections of climate change (with emphasis on temperature) and the UNFCCC proposes measures to moderate those changes. The following chart shows the number of participants at each of the annual meetings of the COP. COP 26 The two largest meetings were those at Paris in 2012 (COP 21) and in Glasgow in 2021 (COP 26). Participants are classed in ...

The most common definition of Scotch Mist is “ A cold and penetrating mist, verging on rain .” There is however another definition: “Something that is hard to find or does not exist” . The latter is the one I am using as a basis of this post, and I’ve chosen it because I am going to look for evidence of warming in Scotland. Glasgow is in Scotland and is, of course, the venue for the COP 26 climate meeting so all the eyes of the world are on that country. The first question to examine is “Is Scotland different to England?” The British Meteorological Office publishes long-term climate data for almost 40 climate stations covering all constituent countries of the United Kingdom. So, for a start let’s compare the long temperature records of Oxford and Stornaway Airport. Oxford is in England and almost as far form the sea as it is possible to be in that country. Its record started in 1853. Stornaway is on the Island of Lewis, to the west of Scotland, and its data go back to 1873. The chart...

Every year there is a meeting of national delegates of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The schedule was broken by COVID restrictions and no meeting was held in 2020. A couple of years ago I posted some comments on the meeting held in Poland in 2018 (http://www.climatedata.info/blogger/index.php?id=6854117018301138519). The last meeting to be held took place 2–13 December 2019 in Madrid, Spain During the previous meeting of the COP, 60 of the participating countries had no temperature stations in the GCHM (Global Historical Climatology Network) data base and only 15 of the 193 parties had more climate stations than members. In COP25 the equivalent numbers were 72 countries with no temperature stations and only 11 countries had more temperature station than delegates. So, in terms of data availability for assessing what was happening to the climate, the situation was clearly getting worse. Disturbing though these figures are, this is not what I want to...