The amount of crap people are ready to swallow to feel righteous about themselves while letting go of critical thinking makes me doubt human survival.
You are deducing "feeling righteous about themselves" without any evidence; which is unfortunate but seems typical for "sceptics".
This following is a waste of time for me, because whatever I say will "go in through one ear and come out of the other", and we will have this same situation a month from now. Still, let me try - I will point out a couple of red flags in the cited article, and how to think about them without feeling self-righteous.
Last year, the Met Office claimed an all-time UK high May 1st temperature at Kew of 29.3°C. Analysis by citizen scientist Dr Eric Huxter showed the temperature was almost 2°C above that recorded in the hour before – well above what might be expected from such temperature rises seen during the day, with movements commonly around the plus or minus 0.2°C to 0.4°C mark.
If the above is correct, then the temperature swing between 6 AM and 12 noon - 6 hours - is 1.2°C to 2.4°C. Does this square with your personal experience?
Today, in the suburban type area where I live, the 6 AM temperature was 21°C and the noon temperature (now) is 32°C.
This is a typical day. The temperature swing is 11°C over 6 hours.
The media writer is innumerate and so are most of its audience. They don't catch what I pointed out, but doing that multiplication is automatic to (the possibly self-righteous) me. Note: Innumeracy is relevant to the point below.
The main culprit in producing these heat spikes is the switch from liquid-in-bulb thermometers to PRT automatic electronic measuring devices during the last 30 years. These provide a more accurate reading every minute, but it is plain that they are picking up every passing heat spike – often unnatural – that were missed by slower-moving liquid in a glass bulb.
Liquid-in-bulb thermometers did not have minute-by-minute monitoring of temperature. The min-max temperature measurement of temperature in a day was measured by something called "Six's thermometer", invented around 1780 or thereabouts. A temperature spike would be indeed be recorded incorrectly by the old liquid-in-bulb thermometers. Today''s temperatures are continuously monitored and recorded digitally, and likely smoothed over a minute by minute average.
Second, the media talks about the peak temperature, precisely because most writers and their audience are innumerate; the complexity of anything beyond a single headline number is beyond most of them. (Yes, I am being snobbish here -- not self-righteous -- but it comes from long experience in both public and corporate settings about the very limited tolerance complexity that most audiences have.)
Here, if it is important to you, I suggest search for isotherm maps over Great Britain for May 26, 2026, the day in question, and digest the elevated temperatures over southern England. The argument around one peak temperature measurement is misguided; but it is what happens outside of scientific circles because that is the level of public discourse that is possible.
---
Any how, once you spot a red flag or two, there are ample resources for you to look further. In a previous post, I posted the results of asking for hard data from weather stations in rural Kent -- which is in southern England, which won't have the urban heat-island effects and so on, addressing all of the objections in the cited article. Because rural Kent does not have the urban heat-island effect, it actually started the day cooler than London, and so the temperature rise per hour was even steeper than in London.
Also look up "heat dome".
----
I am very aware that I cannot convince you or any other climate skeptic. You made an assertion based on a lousy article, so I too made assertions based on that post. If you interpret it as feeling righteous, well, that is your prerogative.
