Lower UK wind speeds and less powerful storms have always been a bit of a disappointment to activists whipping up a climate crisis frenzy to back the Net Zero fantasy. Going back over 50 years, the data is clear on a declining trend. Of course, despite its lamentable inability to step up to the Net Zero plate, wind is one of the UK’s “essential climate variables”, to quote the Met Office’s own words. Since it first started publishing its annual state of the UK climate report, the climatic performance of wind and storms have had their own dedicated chapter. Alas, no more. The 2025 report, published last month, has abolished the chapter – wind it seems is now little more than a footnote. Should do better, some might comment.
However hard one tries to regard the Met Office as a sound independent science body, its obvious Net Zero promotion constantly gets in the way. “Embarrassingly duped by activists” was Matt Ridley’s recent verdict and it is difficult to disagree. How it can justify abolishing wind is almost beyond comprehension. It doesn’t take a particularly cynical nature to suggest the ever-expanding chapter on temperatures is unlikely to disappear in future editions.
The Met Office has had trouble with wind and storms in the past. In January 2024, a spokesperson told a BBC radio programme that UK storms were “more intense” due to the effects of climate change. Paul Homewood asked for an explanation via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, but was told no answer could be provided due to the fact that the information “is not held”.
It often seems that the Met Office does not hold a great deal of information when FOI requests are made. It has been asked many times to supply the names of ‘well-correlated and neighbouring’ stations that are apparently used to estimate temperatures at non-existent weather sites, but the answers always come back none.
You do not have to be particularly conspiratorial or uncharitably minded to find difficulty in understanding why the Met Office has got the hump about the heavenly breezes. As with temperatures, rainfall and sunshine hours, all given a large chapter every year, wind speeds and frequency are measured across a UK-wide network of dedicated weather stations. In its 2024 report, the Met Office described all these observations as “ground truth”, adding that its UK climate monitoring capability would not be possible without them. “When considering the variability in the UK’s climate, it is perhaps helpful to consider the observational series presented in this report as one realisation of an ensemble of possible outcomes which, taken together, represent the UK’s climate overall”, it notes.
Update to the latest report: “… represents the UK’s windless climate overall”.
The big take-out from recent Met Office reports is the graph below showing maximum wind gust speeds back to the 1970s. Noted the Met Office last year, this is a “useful measure” of storminess.
The graph plots the number of days each year on which at least 20 stations recorded gusts exceeding 40/50/60 Kt (46/58/69 mph). This useful storm measure shows an obvious decline over around 50 years in almost all the gust speeds tracked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Met Office has a habit of expressing caution about these inconvenient figures, suggesting data “limitations” might be due to changes in instrument types, the station network size and individual site exposure. Would that such doubts were raised by the State meteorologist about its temperature measuring operation with its 100 non-existent stations, ‘records’ declared from obvious heat spikes picked up by new improved measuring devices, and a hopelessly compromised, unnatural heat-ravaged UK-wide 380-site network.
Lower wind speeds, particularly if they are part of a long-term trend, are not exactly helpful to the current fanatical Net Zero UK Government that is keen to throw billions of pounds of subsidies at promoting renewable energy. No doubt energy ministers will welcome a little reticence on such matters from other government departments.
Of course, the Met Office has not completely given up on the value of windstorm scares to push the Net Zero political project. In its separately published guidance notes on wind, it states: “In future, most climate projections indicate that winter windstorms will increase slightly in number and intensity over the UK i.e., more winter storms, including disproportionately more severe storms, are projected to cross the UK. However, this has medium confidence because a few climate models indicate differently.”
How the Met Office arrives at this conclusion is unclear, although like most Net Zero activists it is keen on the ‘evidence’ produced by selected computer models measuring an unmeasurable atmosphere. It is certainly not backed up by decades of past observations, now conveniently ditched in its recent cherry-pick of essential climate variables. Instead, the report notes individual wind gust extremes and covers major storms in detail, but fails to update vital wind data to provide the trends of most interest to scientists. Needless to say, the Met Office owes the paying public an explanation for its extraordinary behaviour in failing to update such important climate data.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
