Top climate scientists rubbish claims July was the hottest month ever | The Australian
People try to keep cool at Coney Island during the US heatwave. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT – THE AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER
AUGUST 2, 2023
Two of America’s top climate scientists have rubbished claims July was the hottest month on record, deploring a “stunning amount of exaggeration and hype” surrounding the UN Secretary-General’s statement last week that “the era of global boiling [had] arrived.”
Cliff Mass, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington, said the public was being “misinformed on a massive scale” following a deluge of news reports that summer heatwaves in the US and Europe had pushed July’s average temperature above 17 degrees, and allegedly to the highest level in 120,000 years. UN
“It‘s terrible. I think it’s a disaster. There’s a stunning amount of exaggeration and hype of extreme weather and heatwaves, and it’s very counter-productive,” he told The Australian in an interview.
“I’m not a contrarian. I‘m pretty mainstream in a very large [academic] department, and I think most of these claims are unfounded and problematic”.
John Christy, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century were at least as intense as those of more recent decades based on consistent, long-term weather stations going back over a century.
“I haven‘t seen anything yet this summer that’s an all time record for these long term stations, 1936 still holds by far the record for the most number of stations with the hottest ever temperatures,” he told The Australian, referring to the year of a great heatwave in North America that killed thousands.
Professor Christy said an explosion of the number of weather stations in the US and around the world had made historical comparisons difficult because some stations only went back a few years; meanwhile, creeping urbanisation had subjected existing weather stations to additional heat.
“In Houston, for example, in the centre it is now between 6 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding countryside,” he explained in an interview with The Australian.
Major newspapers from the Washington Post to the London Times have reported July as the hottest month on record after the average global daily temperature last month surpassed 17 C – around 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels – based on satellite data compiled by the University of Maine.
“We’re just really starting to see climate change kick in,” Nathan Lenssen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, told the Washington Post last month.
Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at Leipzig University, told the Times that July was “outrageously warm” and may have been the warmest month since the Eemian interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago.
Growing concern about higher temperatures caused by humans has underpinned a global push to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 by phasing out fossil fuels in favour of solar and wind power, fuelling major political and scientific debates.
“Hot enough for you? Thank a MAGA Republican. Or better yet, vote them out of office,” tweeted former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last week.
The IMF cancelled a scheduled talk by Nobel prize winner John Clauser last week after he publicly stated: “I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis, and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”
Professor Christy, conceding a slight warming trend over the last 45 years, said July could be the warmest month on record based on global temperatures measured by satellites – “just edging out 1998” – but such measures only went back to 1979.
Professor Mass said the climate was “radically warmer” around 1000 years ago during what’s known as the Medieval Warm Period, when agriculture thrived in parts of now ice-covered Greenland.
“If you really go back far enough there were swamps near the North Pole, and the other thing to keep in mind is that we‘re coming out of a cold period, a Little Ice Age from roughly 1600 to 1850”.
“Global warming, it‘s a serious issue, but it’s a slow issue, it’s not an existential threat,” he added, suggesting human activities may have added up to one degree Celsius to average temperatures since the 1980s.
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
Adam Creighton is an award-winning journalist with a special interest in tax and financial policy. He was a Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2019. He’s written … Read more
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Related Links:
No, the Earth Did Not have an ‘Unprecedented and Terrifying … All-Time High Temperature’ on July 4th – Not the hottest in 100,000 years – NOAA & AP back away from claim – Meteorologist 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.
Forbes: July 4 Was Earth’s Hottest Day In Over 100000 Years
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…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….
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.
‘Supposed’ Record Temperature In China Not All It Seems – Paul Homewood: “There is a highly coordinated effort taking place to persuade the public that the world’s climate is somehow out of control, with extreme weather everywhere and heatwaves on every continent.” … “Quite clearly, any record temperature set in the Turpan is meaningless and cannot be compared to other locations in China. It is merely the product of a micro climate. There is also a second issue here. Sanbao has no official listing or any historical data…In short we have no way of knowing whether it has been hotter in Saobao in the past, or whether the thermometer there is even properly sited and maintained.”
Bjorn Lomborg: ‘Warming saves 166,000 lives each year: Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year—almost 600,000 deaths—but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually. As temperatures have risen since 2000, heat deaths have increased 0.21%, while cold deaths have dropped 0.51%. Today about 116,000 more people die from heat each year, but 283,000 fewer die from cold. Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.
Watch: Fox host Stuart Varney challenges Morano over heatwave-climate link
Fox Business – Varney & Co. – Broadcast July 19, 2023
Stuart Varney: Marc Morano from the Climate Depot joins me now. We just heard in Phoenix, they had 19 straight days above 110 degrees. Now, wait, you’re a climate skeptic, is this not the result of climate change?
Marc Morano: “This is not outside the normal bounds of hot summer weather. Yes, it’s a record year. It could be one of the hottest, but here’s the thing. Joe Biden’s EPA has a chart of the heatwave index going back to the 1930s. The 1930s are probably 8 to 10 or 12 times hotter in the United States than anything we’re currently seeing.
Morano: 75% of all state temperature records were broken before the 1950s — these records still stand. Now. This is a way that statistics — when you heard things like CNN or New York Times or others have said this is the ‘hottest’ in Earth’s history. Those claims were based on climate models, which even the NOAA –National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration — backed away from. They are weaponizing hot summers, heat waves to turn it into some kind of call for climate action. This is not outside the bounds of normal weather, I’m sorry.
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