The Met Office link-buries the CET

The Central England Temperature Record has been getting some inconvenient attention as of late. Joe D’Aleo at ICECAP pointed out recently:

The Central England Temperature record is one of the longest continuous temperature record in the world extending back to the Little Ice age in 1659. December 2010 was the coldest December in 120 years with an average of -0.7C just short of the record of -0.8C recorded in December 1890 and the Second Coldest December Temperature in the entire record (352 years).

I don’t know if it is simply sloppy webkeeping or related to the fact that the CET isn’t cooperating with the AGW expectations, but the Met Office seems to be burying the data from easy public access. They haven’t eliminated it, but it is now harder to find, and what was once a direct link now points to a general purpose climate change page.

WUWT reader Steve Rosser writes:

…the UK Met Office website, it’s undergoing a refresh at the moment and the CET link seems to have been mysteriously cut.  It used to be readily accessible via the UK Climate summaries page, see below, however this link now redirects you to a global temperature page instead.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2010/

Thinking it may be a genuine mistake I e-mailed an enquiry and received a very polite response redirecting me to find it via the obscure link below.  It’s hard to argue that this location provides a sufficiently high profile for such an august dataset..

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/david-parker

It may be that the original link will reinstated over the next few days in which case this is a non story.  However, it looks suspicously like they are taking the focus away from the CET as after 2010 it’s showing an embarrasing disinclination to follow the AGW orthodoxy (+0.4 deg C since 1780).  To do so would be a betrayal of their lack of impartiality which I’d personally find very disappointing.  It would also send a message that rather than face-up and make the case for 2010 being a rogue year for UK temperatures they’d rather brush the whole thing under the carpet. I hope I’m wrong.

I checked the pages, and what he says is true. First here’s the main climate page of the Met Office: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2010/

Note the CET link highlighted in yellow:

This is the page that CET link takes you to:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/science/monitoring

There’s not a single mention of the CET on that page, but plenty of other datasets are mentioned.

Fortunately, the CET data page is still available, on another Met Office server here, but if you don’t know where to look, you won’t find it easily via the Met Office Climate page.

As I said earlier, this may be sloppy, or it may be intentional.

Given the mess related to the winter forecast we’ve recently seen from the Met Office, I’m inclined to invoke the

“never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple stupidity”

clause.