Met Office’s vanishing wind chapter raises fresh questions about climate data

• The Met Office removed the wind and storms chapter from its 2025 climate report, obscuring five decades of declining wind speed data.
• Declining wind speeds and storm intensity undercut the government’s Net Zero push, which relies heavily on wind power subsidies.
• The agency dismissed FOI requests for evidence behind claims of more intense storms, saying the information is not held.
• A new record high temperature at Lingwood was confirmed despite the site violating World Meteorological Organisation siting standards.
• Critics argue the Met Office prioritizes political narratives over scientific transparency, saying it is no longer a serious scientific organisation.

The UK Met Office has quietly eliminated the dedicated chapter on wind and storms from its latest annual climate report, an omission first flagged by The Daily Sceptic that obscures five decades of data showing declining wind speeds and storm intensity — trends that undercut the government’s Net Zero push. The change comes as the agency continues to expand its temperature-focused sections, raising questions about whether Britain’s state weather service is prioritizing political narratives over scientific transparency.

The 2025 State of the UK Climate report, published last month, marks the first edition since the report’s inception to relegate wind and storm analysis to little more than a footnote. For years, the chapter provided context on what the Met Office itself once called an “essential climate variable.” Observational data stretching back to the 1970s shows a steady decline in maximum wind gust speeds across most UK weather stations — a measure the agency had previously described as a “useful measure” of storminess.

A pattern of missing data requests

The wind chapter’s disappearance is not an isolated incident, critics say. In January 2024, a Met Office spokesperson told BBC radio that UK storms were becoming “more intense” because of climate change. When climate blogger Paul Homewood filed a Freedom of Information request seeking the evidence behind that claim, the agency responded that the information “is not held.” The Met Office has similarly declined repeated requests to name the “well-correlated and neighbouring” weather stations it says it uses to estimate temperatures at sites with no data of their own — a gap critics say undermines its credibility as an independent scientific body.

Wind’s inconvenient decline

The Met Office’s own report describes its observational series as “ground truth” underpinning UK climate monitoring. Yet by failing to update the wind data showing a long-term decline in storminess, the agency sidesteps a trend that cuts against the broader climate crisis narrative. It has previously cited “limitations” in its wind figures tied to changes in instruments and station exposure — caution rarely extended to its temperature records, which have faced their own scrutiny.

The timing carries real stakes: the UK government is pouring billions into wind power subsidies as part of its Net Zero strategy, and sustained evidence of declining wind speeds complicates the case for that spending. The agency has not entirely abandoned storm warnings, however; separate guidance projects that winter windstorms could increase in number and intensity, though it concedes the projection carries only “medium confidence” because “a few climate models indicate differently.”

Temperature records raise fresh doubts

The agency’s credibility has also been strained by recent temperature controversies. In June, the Met Office declared a new record high of 37.7 C at Lingwood, Norfolk, despite the site being a non-compliant “junk” station surrounded by hedges and trees that violate World Meteorological Organisation siting standards. After an inspection confirmed the problems and found others, the Met Office confirmed the record anyway, raising it to 38.0 C and blaming a reading error by the site’s operator. Homewood, who has scrutinized the agency’s data practices for months, argued the Met Office is “no longer a serious scientific organisation.”

The Lingwood episode follows the agency’s claim that Storm Éowyn was worse than the Great Storm of 1987, which killed 18 people and felled an estimated 15 million trees — a comparison Homewood called “gaslighting of the highest order,” noting Éowyn’s strongest gusts were measured on exposed hilltops and coastal cliffs rather than at ground level.

The Met Office answers to the British public, not to a policy agenda, and the public that funds it is owed a plain explanation for why the wind chapter vanished the same year its trend line stopped cooperating. Until that accounting arrives, taxpayers underwriting billions in wind subsidies have every reason to ask whether an “essential climate variable” was dropped because it was inconvenient, not because it stopped mattering.

Sources for this article include:

WattsUpWithThat.com

DailySceptic.org

DailySceptic.org