Spotted online recently:
I haven’t been living in the UK for 20 years now. And I certainly wasn’t there this April.
But I am aware of several (or more) people who were. Among their number, apparently, were some people working for the Met Office, one of the world’s leading weather services, providing forecasts and climate data for almost 170 years, and Paul Cox, a right-wing comedian of whom I had never heard before seeing his tweet above.
Obviously, Paul wouldn’t want to hear that April had been (just) warmer than average, given that this sort of news doesn’t suit the GB News agenda. But then equally, I doubt that the Met Office really cares about the GB News agenda. And I don’t think that the Met Office would deliberately sully its image by just tossing out incorrect information to make Paul and his opinion-orientated cronies grumpy.
Presumably, Paul thinks it’s been colder than the Met Office data suggests and thus doesn’t agree with the Met Office’s statement, but then he’s likely relying on anecdotal evidence like it feeling a bit chilly when he went to pick up some fags at the Spar that Tuesday morning, rather than their more than 200 weather stations across the UK measuring:
…a large variety of different meteorological parameters, including air temperature; atmospheric pressure; rainfall; wind speed and direction, humidity; cloud height and visibility.
No axe to grind here, but I know whose data I think might be more accurate on how just warm April was.
But then Paul goes weirdly off-message and tries to compare the UK’s average temperature in April to:
A polar bears [sic] ball bag
I presume that by “ball bag”, he is using the colloquial term for scrotum.
The thing is though, the UK’s mean temperature for April was 8.3o, and a polar bear, being a mammal, has a body temperature of around 37o. Even allowing for the slightly cooler temperature required for effective spermatogenesis, the seasonal nature of this biological process in polar bears, their bouts of swimming in icy waters, and their light hibernation during the winter, the average temperature of a polar bear’s ball bag will still comfortably remain somewhere in the mid-30os.
This is clearly way higher than the UK in April – or any other month.
What on earth were you thinking about, Paul?
There is absolutely no chance that the average temperature calculated by the Met Office in April is warmer than a polar bears ball bag.
Now if only he’d suggested the bottom of a penguin’s foot…