Via The Australian: Cliff Mass, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington, said the public was being ‚””misinformed on a massive scale “”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.””
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.””
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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 urbanization 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.
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.
