Tag Archives: Hottest day

Climate Fact-Check July 2023 Edition

From ClimateRealism

By Steve Milloy

Guest Post by: The Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate.

Editor’s note: This summary serves as a fact check on the biggest false claims made in the media in July, 2023. 

The media is calling July 2023 the “hottest month on record” and even the “hottest month in the history of civilization.” Keeping in mind that July is typically the warmest month of every year, NASA satellite data indicate that July 2023 was the warmest July in the satellite record. But that record only dates back to 1979 and there certainly were Julys before 1979.

In terms of monthly temperature anomalies (temperature differences relative to a common baseline used to evaluate the notion of emissions-driven “global warming”), February 2016 had a greater anomaly than July 2023. March 2016 had the same anomaly and April 1998 was only an unmeasurable 0.02°C lower (see graph, below, and data). So February-March 2016 and April 1998 are not really endorsements of the hypothesis that every emission warms the planet.

Recalling that average global temperature is on the order of 58°F, use of the term “hottest” is obviously quite an exaggeration. Finally, the notion of “average global temperature” is not really meaningful in the first place. It has no physical reality, and its component satellite and surface station temperature measurements lack precision to a significant degree.

Notwithstanding the above, was July 2023 the “hottest month in the history of civilization”? We will address that after you check out the 10 climate fact checks for July 2023 presented below.

Links: The Washington Post article, Climate Reanalyzer, Temperature.global data.

Links: Climate Reanalyzer, Climate Realism post, Temperature.global data, Associated Press article.

Links: The New York Times article, Met Office, Climate Realism post.

Links: Associated Press article, Arizona State Climate Twitter post.

Links: The Washington Post article, Real Climate Science post.

Links: The Washington Post article.

Links: Associated Press article, Fort Myers News-Press article.

Links: USA Today article, The Lancet Planetary Health, Climate Realism post.

Links: The Washington Post article.

Links: The Washington Post article.

So was July 2023 the “hottest month in the history of civilization”? Consider the following.

July’s warm temperature was skewed by the strong, short-term spike in Antarctic temperatures highlighted below. Such a short-term pike in temperatures is not indicative of a long-term climate trend, but rather anomalous, localized factors.

That heat wave was only detected and factored into average global temperature because of satellite coverage of the globe. But satellite coverage didn’t begin until 1979. So similar heat waves that may have occurred before 1979 would be unknown and not factored into average global temperature calculations. So it is not possible to claim that July 2023 was the “hottest month in the history of civilization” because such data does not exist.

Finally, it is important to recall that the basis of climate alarm is that emissions of greenhouse gases drive global warming. We believe recent warming has been driven by the series of El Nino events since 1980, not emissions. July’s warm temperatures do not alter this view as, in fact, a new El Nino seems to have started.

Until next month…

Reposted from JunkScience.com, to read the original PDF, click here.

Steve Milloy

https://junkscience.com/

Steve Milloy is a recognized leader in the fight against junk science with more than 25 years of accomplishment and experience. He is the founder of JunkScience.com and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.

Unbelievable Record Heat

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Gregory Wrightstone tells it like it is at CO2 Coalition Data Shows We’re NOT Seeing Record Heat.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Hotter Than the Fourth of July!

It was widely reported recently that July 4th, 2023 was the hottest day in Earth’s recorded history.

Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute stated: “It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial.” And, of course, it was reported that it was our fault due to our “sins of emission.”

This didn’t meet the smell test for the scientists at the CO2 Coalition. We know that previous warm periods were warmer than our modern temperatures. For example, during the Roman Warm Period there was citrus being grown in the north of England and barley was grown by Vikings on Greenland 1,000 years ago. Why aren’t they grown there now? It’s quite simple: Lower modern temperatures.

So, here at the CO2 Coalition, we did what scientists are trained to do:

We looked at the available data. Our Science and Research Associate Byron Soepyan reviewed temperature data from the US Historical Climatology Network and found that both the number of weather stations reporting temperature over 100 degrees F and the Maximum Average Temperature for July 4th were slightly declining since the record began in 1895 – not increasing – as Ceppi claimed.

The Great Texas Heat Wave

It is summer. It is hot in Texas. It is not unusual or unprecedented. Below is a chart of the percentage of days in Texas that were above 100 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. Despite a significant and steady rise in CO2 emissions, there has been a decline in the occurrence of very hot days.

Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist; executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, VA; and author of Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know.

No, the Earth Did Not have an ‘Unprecedented and Terrifying … All-Time High Temperature’ on July 4th

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

On July 3rd and 4th and the following days, multiple mainstream media outlets ran stories claiming that the Earth had experienced an unprecedented hot day(s). This is false. The data they cited was not official data, but from a private website and investigation shows the claim was a gross error.

Some sample headlines from that week are:

Yahoo News: ‘Unprecedented and terrifying’: World sets all-time high temperature record 2 days in a row

CNN: The planet saw its hottest day on record this week. It’s a record that will be broken again and again

Forbes: July 4 Was Earth’s Hottest Day In Over 100000 Years

UPI: Climate scientists: July 4 was hottest ever for average global temperature

CNBC: World registers hottest day since records began

In the CNBC article, reporter Sam Meredith wrote:

The planet’s average daily temperature climbed to 17.18 degrees Celsius (62.9 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, an unofficial tool that is often used by climate scientists as a reference to the world’s condition.

“Monday, July 3rd was the hottest day ever recorded on Planet Earth. A record that lasted until … Tuesday, July 4th,” said Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, via Twitter.

“Totally unprecedented and terrifying,” he added.

Apparently, all those people missed the fact that they were looking at the output of a climate model, not actually measured temperatures. Only one news outlet, The Associated Press, bothered to print a sensible caveat. In the July 5th story “Earth hit an unofficial record high temperature this week – and stayed there” reporting:

On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration distanced itself from the designation, compiled by the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition. That metric showed that Earth’s average temperature on Wednesday remained at an unofficial record high, 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius), set the day before.

The AP updated its story on July 7th to include this single yet very important paragraph:

NOAA, whose figures are considered the gold standard in climate data, said in a statement Thursday that it cannot validate the unofficial numbers. It noted that the reanalyzer uses model output data, which it called “not suitable” as substitutes for actual temperatures and climate records. The agency monitors global temperatures and records on a monthly and an annual basis, not daily.

So, in the space of two days, we went from temperature data that was “[t]otally unprecedented and terrifying,” to temperature data that was not suitable for purpose.

How did this happen? It was a chain of events involving “experts” on social media who first noticed this graph on climatereanalyser.org:

Figure 1: global temperature graph, July 4, 2023, from climatereanlyser.org

Note the uptick in black at the top, that’s supposedly proof of the hottest day ever in Earth’s history. Social media created a “viral” response to this, and the poorly trained yet climate narrative compliant mainstream media picked up the story and ran with it.

Some people, such as Ryan Maue, Ph.D., tried to put out the wrongheaded social media fire on Twitter. He notes that the climate model used isn’t even current, circa 2009/2011:

It seems the media, social and otherwise, saw what they expected to see and got fooled. They failed to check the source of the data before rushing to judgment.

Although, on July 8, the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer website was forced to put up this notice on their global temperature page:

But even that claim is false, because in fact the NCEP CFSv2 used by Climate Reanalyzer and listed at the top of their graph, is in fact defined as a model according to its developer, NOAA:

The CFS version 2 was developed at the Environmental Modeling Center at NCEP. It is a fully coupled model representing the interaction between the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land, and sea ice.

So much for Climate Reanalyzer’s “not a model” claims. They simply “got caught with their pants down,” and the special notice was little more than damage control.

Even if the Climate Reanalyzer output had accurately reflected the temperature data recorded since satellites data began, there is no justification for the bizarre claims made by outlets such such as Forbes: “July 4 Was Earth’s Hottest Day In Over 100000 Years”

Note that in Figure 1, climatereanalyser.org only has data back to 1979. That makes the 100,000 year claim not just far-fetched, but impossible to verify or substantiate.

The mainstream media’s behavior in response to the claims made by Climate Reanalyzer made what should have been passed unnoticed as a bizarre outlier in climate data into headline news around the globe. This treatment was unjustifiable, a blatantly false portrayal by social media and mainstream media to push the climate crisis narrative forward. If the mainstream media had any integrity left, retractions would be published, yet there shamefully does not seem to be a single one.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.

Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.

He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.

He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

The climate scaremongers: The day the Earth didn’t catch fire

From conservativewoman

By Paul Homewood

YOU probably saw stories last week claiming that Thursday July 6 was the hottest day on Earth in the history of human civilisation. Climate scientists said that the global average temperature was precisely 17.23 deg C. Yes, not 17.22 or 17.24C.

Some went as far as to claim that it was the hottest day for 125,000 years.

Naturally the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt attempted to trick the public into thinking that because we had some sunny weather last month, the whole world must be burning up. 

The idea that we can measure the world’s temperature to a hundredth of a degree is of course ridiculous. Indeed the very concept of a global temperature is unscientific, because there is no such thing.

The calculations behind this claim are, you won’t be surprised to learn, based on computer modelling. The models go back only to 1979, when satellite data became available. This was a time when there had just been three decades of global cooling and a massive expansion of Arctic sea ice. It is little wonder that temperatures have increased since.

Prior to the satellite era, much of the world had little or no reliable temperature data, so we have no idea at all what temperatures were then, particularly in the early 20th century and before.

It is summer, so inevitably some places are hot. But the map of temperature anomalies behind the claim tells a totally different story to the one peddled by the BBC. 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 around Antarctica, where, as Climate Reanalyzer explain, weather patterns in the southern hemisphere have brought warmer air than usual. Because polar regions are so dry, a small change in heat produces a large swing in temperature, whereas it requires much more energy change to produce the same size swing in temperatures in the mid-latitudes. This is because water has a much higher heat capacity than air. Think, for instance, of the Sahara Desert, and how temperatures fall away dramatically at night because the dry air holds so little heat there.

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 at all.

As for the claim that it is now warmer than any time in the history of human civilisation, this is self-evidently bogus. There is an abundance of evidence that the world’s climate was much warmer than now for most of the last 10,000 or so years since the last Ice Age ended.

Studies of treelines, tree rings, ice cores, glaciers, ocean sediments, stalactites and many other proxies all point to the same thing – a Holocene optimum, which lasted up to maybe 5,000 years ago. This was followed by the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warm periods, and the Little Ice Age, which was probably the coldest era since the Ice Age and which ended during the 19thC.

This evidence comes from all around the world. Even, for instance, in New Zealand:

https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/information-and-resources/clivar/pastclimate

Is there any other branch of science where so-called scientists can simply make up fairy tales and pass them off to a corrupt media as fact?

BP and another waste of energy

SINCE 1952, BP has published its Annual Statistical Review of World Energy. In BP’s words, this is ‘a constant source of objective, comprehensive – and, most importantly – trusted data to help industry, governments and commentators make sense of developments in global energy markets’.

This year’s edition has just been released, and it has a new custodian, the Energy Institute, which BP says is ‘the chartered professional membership body for people who work in energy’. 

It is slightly concerning, therefore, that the Energy Institute is not quite the professional body that BP makes out, but a lobby group for Net Zero. According to its website, its objective is ‘creating a better energy future for our members and society by accelerating a just global energy transition to net zero’. Its president is Juliet Davenport, founder of Good Energy, a renewable energy company; senior positions are occupied by other lobbyists for renewables. Whether the review is quite as objective, comprehensive and trusted going forward remains to be seen!

Nevertheless this year’s edition provides the same categories of data as previous ones. The story can be summed up in a handful of charts.

First, emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise, a seemingly relentless trend, arrested only during the lockdowns of 2020. Last year saw yet another record high. Emissions now stand 5 per cent higher than in 2015, when the world’s politicians supposedly agreed to save the planet in Paris.

Whilst emissions in OECD countries have fallen by 1,287million tonnes since 2011, they have increased by 3,790million tonnes in the rest of the world. The UK’s total emissions are tiny in comparison.

Despite repeated claims of whopping increases in renewable capacity, fossil fuels continue to dominate, still increasing year-on-year. Meanwhile wind and solar account for only a tiny 5 per cent of the world’s energy:

And as our final chart illustrates, the small reduction in fossil fuel consumption in OECD countries has been offset by a six times larger increase in the rest of the world. Again we see that the increase in wind and solar energy has been tiny in comparison.

It has been evident all along that the world’s poorer countries were not prepared to sacrifice their public’s standards of living on the altar of climate change. This means the provision of abundant, reliable and cheap energy that only fossil fuels can supply.

The full review can be downloaded here.

Hottest Day Evah!

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Do they think we are really so gullible?

Tuesday was the hottest single day on Earth in the history of human civilization, according to a combination of global satellite data and historical tree ring analysis. One point in far northern Canada was hotter than Miami. In Siberia, the temperature in Altai hit 94°F. Despite July being mid-winter in the Southern Hemisphere, temperatures in Argentina and Chile soared to more than 86°F (30°C). In the Philippines, Metro Manila recorded its hottest-ever July day. The temperature in Iran, Algeria, and Oman all reached 122°F (50°C).

“It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial,” Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, told the Washington Post. Given Earth’s annual temperature cycle typically peaks in late July, this is a record that could be broken several more times this month.

https://currently.beehiiv.com/p/july-6-2023?utm_source=currently.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=currently-july-6-2023-earth-s-hottest-day-in-recorded-history

The idea that we know the global temperature today is absurd in itself. But the idea that we actually know what it was on a given day 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago, never mind thousands of years ago is sheer fraud.

And the claim that it is hotter now than 5000 years ago is a total lie – there is abundant evidence that it was much warmer then.

And as always with all of these silly scare stories, they cherry pick some high temperatures in the Arctic, knowing that the public will find them alarming because they assume the Arctic is always freezing normally.

For instance, “One point in far northern Canada was hotter than Miami.”

The link takes us to Kuujjuaq:

And the daily temperature from KNMI shows that temperatures over 90F, 32C, are not uncommon there. The new record of 93F replaces the old record of 92F set in 1999, which is hardly cause for panic!

https://climexp.knmi.nl/selectdailyseries.cgi?id=someone@somewhere

Then there’s Siberia:

“In Siberia, the temperature in Altai hit 94°F.”

But again we learn that temperatures often exceed 90F there; the record of 96F was set in 2000:

And according to the con merchants, there has been record-setting melt of the Greenland ice sheet.

Maybe Eric Holthaus has been holding his graph upside down! Greenland has added 100Gt of ice during June, when it is supposed to be melting.

http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

Naturally the BBC and the rest of the media lackeys have been peddling the same lies and nonsense:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66104822

Hottest day “in human history” was cooler than most of the holocene

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant

So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?

Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere.  On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah.  Who are we kidding?

Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 hour periods. We can’t compare 20 year smoothed averages with a single 24 hour snapshot. Well, scientific prostitutes can, but not real scientists.

If it was a record “hottest day”, it might have been the hottest day in the last 40 years (maybe, and if only we had good thermometers, didn’t put them at airports, near air conditioners and incinerators, didn’t go electronic, hide the calibration data, and adjustify the records, eh?). It’s a big so-what.

And in the end we know it there have been hotter years before in human civilization, and probably thousands of them.

Who is trying to erase the Holocene?

Don’t they teach climate scientists anything anymore?  Karsten Haustein, from the University of Leipzig was telling the BBC that July will possibly be the hottest “since the Eemian”,  120,000 years ago, as if the Holocene optimum period didn’t exist.

A mere 5,000 years ago sea levels were higher, corals were happy, people thrived, and Greenland was a lot warmer. This was a global phenomenon — higher sea levels and some 6,000 boreholes drilled around the world show the same pattern.

It was hotter for thousands of years and CO2 was irrelevant.

What the world needs are some real science journalists who can ask these badly trained junior modelers what happened to the Holocene?

This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the Little Ice Age.

Sea levels were higher all around the world

How could the oceans be higher all around the world if the world was not warmer?  Sea levels have been falling for the last 7,000 years around Australia, they used to be nearly 1m higher in the South China Sea, South Africa and Polynesia and it’s a similar pattern around the world (thanks NoTricksZone). Studies on mangroves in Brazil show sea levels were about 2.7 meters higher in the mid-Holocene, and mangroves grew 34 kilometers further inland.  (Fontes et al 2017). CO2 Science lists references all over the world. I am barely skimming the surface.

Other researchers estimate the waters flowing out of the Pacific Ocean past Indonesia were a full 2 degrees Celcius warmer 7,000 years ago. (Rosenthal, (2013). Somehow corals did not go extinct, ancient viruses didn’t wipe out the Sumerians, and humans spread across the Earth.

Sea levels were higher off  the very geologically stable Western Australia 7,000 years ago. Across the other side of Australia in NSW sea levels were 1 – 1.5m higher.

Sea level has been falling for 7,000 years in Western Australia  (Lewis et al)

A thousand stories of human pain and triumph from the last ten thousand years are being erased from the records. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year mega drought about 6,000 years ago (see McGowan et al 2012). And massive fires raged across far north Australia 4,000 years ago that were far worse than today. (Rehn et al 2021).

Another proxy suggesting the Holocene warmer temperatures were global is the heat flow data measured in 6,000 boreholes across six continents down to about 2km.  Sometime from 5,000 to 10,000 years ago temperatures were hotter than they are now.

Location of boreholes for heat flow studies.

6,000 boreholes drilled around Earth show temperatures were hotter in the holocene. Figure 1. Suite of reconstructions of surface temperature history over the last 20,000 years. Nine curves correspond to three values of thermal diffusivity. The reference level is the mean of the instrumental record from 1961-1990 AD. (Huang et al 2008)

The hottest day in the last 150 years is irrelevant.

REFERENCES

Fontes et al (2017) The Impacts of the Middle Holocene High Sea-Level Stand and Climatic Changes on Mangroves of the Jucuruçu River, Southern Bahia – Northeastern Brazil, Radiocarbon , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 215 – 230.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2017.6

Huang, S. P., H. N. Pollack, and P.-Y. Shen (2008), A late Quaternary climate reconstruction based on borehole heat flux data, borehole temperature data, and the instrumental record, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L13703, doi:10.1029/2008GL034187   [PDF] Long blog discussion on boreholes.

Lewis, S.E., et al., Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian margin: a review, Quaternary Science Reviews (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006 [abstract] 

Hamish McGowan,Samuel Marx, Patrick Moss, Andrew Hammond (2012): Evidence of ENSO mega-drought triggered collapse of prehistory Aboriginal society in northwest Australia, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 39, Issue 22.  DOI: 10.1029/2012GL053916 [Abstract]

Rehn, E. et al (2021) A late-Holocene multiproxy fire record from a tropical savanna, eastern Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia [PDF]

Rosenthal, Y., Braddock K. Linsley, Delia W. Oppo (2013) Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years, Science 1 November,Vol. 342 no. 6158 pp. 617-621  DOI: 10.1126/science.1240837 [Sciencemag.org ]