From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Justin Rowlatt plays the shell game:

It is hot. Very hot. And we are only a few weeks into summer.

Texas and part of the south-west of the US are enduring a searing heatwave. At one point, more than 120 million Americans were under some form of heat advisory, the US National Weather Service said. That is more than one in three of the total population.

In the UK, the June heat didn’t just break all-time records, it smashed them. It was 0.9C hotter than the previous record, set back in 1940. That is a huge margin.

There is a similar story of unprecedented hot weather in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

No surprise, then, that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather forecasts said that globally, June was the hottest on record.

And the heat has not eased. The three hottest days ever recorded were in the past week, according to the EU climate and weather service, Copernicus.

The average world temperature hit 16.89C on Monday 3 July and topped 17C for the first time on 4 July, with an average global temperature of 17.04C.

Provisional figures suggest that was exceeded on 5 July when temperatures reached 17.05C.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66143682

It’s summer, so inevitably some places are hot! But Justin Rowlatt wants you to focus on those and ignore all the other places that aren’t.

The full picture tells a totally different story. Across the world as a whole, there is the usual mix of above and below temperatures:

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/

The only exception is Antarctica, and the Climate Reanalyzer website has added this special note explaining this, no doubt concerned at the way the media and climate scientists have misled the public about the significance of the spike in temperatures:

It is of course winter down under, and temperatures in and around Antarctica are still well below freezing, even though they may be 10C higher than average.

Such intrusions of moist, warm air from lower latitudes into polar air mass are not unusual, as we have frequently seen in the Arctic in recent years during winter months. And it is precisely this phenomenon which makes the whole idea of an average global temperature totally meaningless. It all has to do with water vapour.

Because polar regions are so dry, a small change in heat produces a large swing in polar temperature, whereas it requires much more energy change to produce the same size swing in temperatures in the mid-latitudes. This is because of the fact that water has a much higher heat capacity than air.

Think, for instance, of the Sahara Desert. Temperatures fall away dramatically at night because the dry air holds so little heat.

Although average global temperatures may have increased because of the warm air brought to the Antarctic, the overall heat content of the Earth’s atmosphere has not changed.

But Justin Rowlatt would like you to think that the world is burning up because of a few sunny days last month.