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The Tale Of Two Summers–2023 v 1976

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heatwave-1976

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66084543

It seems an age since we had that couple of weeks of nice sunny weather in June.

Of course, it generated all sorts of extravagant claims, and we were told it was evidence of climate change in action.

Since then the month has been brought up routinely whenever discussion of the “heatwave summer” has reared its head, ignoring the inconvenient fact that the British summer since has been distinctly cool.

As I pointed out at the time, it was a long way from being the hottest June on record here, with the longer running CET series showing that it was only the fifth warmest, with June 1846 being more than a degree hotter.

The warmth this year arose from the fact that the warm, sunny weather lasted pretty much from start to finish of the month. But at no stage did temperatures become exceptionally high:

CET daily max temperatures only reached 28.6C, which is not unusually high for June at all:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html

But the most deceitful claim was that it had been “even hotter than 1976”, which the Met Office described as part of the well-known summer of 1976.

This statement was deliberately intended to fool the public into believing that June 2023 had been in some way exceptional.

It was of course no such thing.

As I explained at the time, any comparison with 1976 was meaningless, as the heatwave that year really only got going in the last week of the month, unlike this year:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html

But when it did get going, it was far more intense and longer lasting than anything we have seen this summer. Now we have the July data, we can see fully that there is no comparison between 1976 and this summer.

During most summers we see a week or so of hot weather. This year it just happened to arrive in June.

There is nothing unusual or untoward about that fact. It is merely weather, and has nothing whatsoever to do with climate change.