The Met Office no longer thinks that wind is a form of weather

Ross on Why

While I have always loved the words of John Bunyan’s hymn, To Be a Pilgram, my inner pedant has always slightly rebelled against the line ‘come wind, come weather’. Isn’t the wind supposed to be part of the weather, in which case why speak of them separately? But it now seems that the Met Office concurs with Bunyan: wind is no longer an element of weather and climate, and therefore there is no need to present us with any historic data on the subject.

The annual State of the Climate Report published by the Met Office and the Royal Meteorological Society is usually a very good resource for anyone wanting to understand weather and climate. In contrast to the climate modelling with which we are bombarded every week, this is real-world data picking out changes in the UK climate over the past century or so. It shows, as you might expect, gradually rising temperatures. It is also picks out increasing rainfall: it shows that Britain as a whole has been 8 percent wetter during the past decade than during the reference period 1961-1990, with most of that concentrated in the winter months. As for sunshine, we are seeing more of it. From an average of 1300 hours a century ago we are now getting around 1450 hours.

But wind? The State of the Climate Report has in recent years put this into historic context, too. The trend depicted here will surprise many people because it shows a distinct downwards trend in overall wind speeds and also in extreme wind speeds over the past 40 years. Britain, contrary to the lazy assertion made every time we have a windy day, is becoming less stormy; a trend which, by the way, is evident around much of the world. The decline in extreme wind speeds is depicted in the 2024 report in the form of the following graph:

This is summarised at the beginning of the report with the following statement:

Wind

Observations do not currently suggest that the UK’s climate is becoming windier or stormier.

· The UK annual mean wind speed from 1969 to 2024 shows a downward trend, consistent with that observed globally.

· There have been fewer occurrences of maximum gust speeds exceeding 40/50/60 Kt in the last two decades compared to the 1980s and 1990s.

Remarkably, however, the above graph does not appear in the 2025 edition of the State of the Climate Report, published a fortnight ago. It has been disappeared, along with the entire chapter on wind. The only reference to wind is in a section entitled ‘significant weather events’ which focuses on a single storm, Eowyn, in late January 2025. There is no attempt to pick out trends in the frequency of high winds over the past few decades.

When I asked the Met Office why the section on wind has been dropped it replied: “The reports for individual years of the State of the UK Climate Report form part of a series, and each report is still available online . This allows us to cover a wider range of themes rather than slavishly covering every section every year.” I don’t find that explanation entirely convincing. Why suddenly abolish an entire section on wind, as if wind is no longer part of the climate? After all, the temperature section never seems to go missing.

There is a long tradition of meteorological and climate data being disappeared when, some might say, it is inconvenient to a narrative that climate change is making everything worse. It happened with data on US wildfires which the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) used to publish going back to the 1920s. The, suddenly, only data going back to 1983 was published, the excuse being that there had been a minor change in methodology that year. But it so happened that the 1980s marked a low point in wildfires in the US. Go back further and you find far greater acreages of land being burned. The earlier data – which can still be found in the bowels of the internet – shows that the prevalence of fires plunged in the 1940s, from a level that is far higher than that of today.

A similar thing has happened with high temperature records. What was formerly listed by the World Meteorological Organisation as the highest temperature recorded on Earth – 57.8 Celsius recorded in Libya in 1922 - has been decertified, and there is a campaign to remove the next highest temperature recorded - 56.7 Celsius in Death Valley, California, in 1913 - based on doubts as to the quality of the thermometer. It doesn’t, however, take too much to realise why these records are viewed by some to be a little inconvenient to a certain narrative of climate change. If you are truly concerned about methodology employed in recordings taken decades ago, you would surely want them all removed from the record books, yet no-one seems to question 100 year old records when they are being used to show rising global temperatures.

When data starts being disappeared, there is a serious danger of climate science losing objectivity and morphing into activism. Some, like Bill McGuire, writing in the Guardian this week, seem pretty open about wanting exactly this. He wrote: “Just imagine how much the scientific community could make if it spoke with the same voice – demanding the reinstatement of climate-friendly policies, arguing for more rapid emissions cuts, and at the same time overwhelming the perfidious calls for inertia from those lobbying for business as usual.”

Does that sound like the voice of someone dedicated to the dispassionate study of the climate? No, not to me either.