Why "Climate Change" Seems To Have Faded From The News
/In a post a few days ago, I noted that "the whole climate issue seems to have mostly disappeared from the news lately." Commenter niceguyeddie responded by giving me a link to the Washington Post (eddie called it "the 'other' Pravda"), and an article of July 5 by a guy named Jason Samenow headlined "Red-hot planet: All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week." In the intervening week since this article, a few people on the internet have been busy making mincemeat of Samenow's rather pitiful effort. For MC readers who don't go out searching the internet regularly for real information on climate to combat the propaganda from the various Pravdas out there, I thought I would do the public service of presenting some of this real information here.
First, some basic background is needed to develop appropriate bullshit radar on this subject. If you follow climate or weather information even a little, you will already know that on any given day, somewhere in the world, some weather station, or more likely multiple stations, is recording an "all time high" temperature for the particular day in question, while some other weather station, or maybe multiple stations, is recording an "all time low." It follows that the fact that multiple "all time high" records were set during the course of a week tells you nothing about climate change. There could have been even more all time lows, and the overall average could have gone down, no matter how many "all time highs" were recorded. Any reader of any intelligence whatsoever will immediately be asking, don't just tell me about "all time highs," but tell me what is the overall picture? How many all time lows were there? What is happening with the "average" temperature? You will not be surprised to learn that Samenow does not provide the answers to those questions. In other words, his article is not intended to provide useful information to the intelligent reader, but rather to propagandize those lacking in either basic background information or critical thinking ability or both.
There is an obvious source for the answer to the last question as to what is happening with the "average," and that is the easily-available UAH global lower troposphere record, derived from satellite sensors. That record exists from 1979 to present. Here is the latest chart from UAH going through the end of June 2018:
So with that simple first step, we know that the "average" world temperature for June 2018 was +0.21 deg C above the 1981 - 2010 mean. That represented a decline of about 0.65 deg C from the all time high of this 39-year record, which was reached in early 2016. The 0.65 deg C decline represented more than 75% of the amount by which the average temperature had exceeded the 1981 - 2010 mean at the highest point. Suddenly the fact that some large number of "all time highs" was being set at the end of June does not seem very significant.
But it's still fun to look at what Samenow claims for his "all time highs," to see how real they are, or whether we are dealing with more of the usual "fake news." This gets pretty bad.
Of all of Samenow's "all time highs," exactly one is from the United States: "Denver tied its all-time high-temperature record of 40.5 Celsius [105 F] on Thursday [June 28]." Readers who ever go to Denver will recognize that the current airport (and associated weather station) only opened in 1995. That's a convenient truncation! What's the actual all-time high for Colorado? From Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, July 7:
The all-time State record temperatures for Colorado were set in 1933 and 1954, long before Denver International Airport was opened in 1995.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records
The 105 deg F from Denver Airport on June 28 isn't even close to that record. Homewood then helpfully includes a chart of the all time high temperatures from all of the 50 states (from NOAA data). Not only are none of them from June or July 2018, but:
- The most recent is from 2012 (113 deg F in South Carolina).
- The only other one from after 2000 is from South Dakota, 120 deg F in 2006; but that one did not actually set a record, but only tied a record of the same temperature from that state originally set in 1936.
- A substantial plurality of the record all time highs were set in the period of 1910 - 1940 -- in other words, well before the era of human-induced global warming can be credibly claimed to have begun.
- In Montana, the all time high of 117 deg F set in 1893 still stands (although it was tied in 1937).
Should we try a few from Europe? Samenow has three. First there is one from Scotland. This quote is from the original version of Samenow's article, which is excerpted in Homewood's post:
The UK Met Office reported Motherwell, about 20km southeast of Glasgow, hit 33.2C on Thursday, passing the previous record set in August 2003 at Greycrook.
Oops! That claimed "record" has since been withdrawn. It seems that it was caused by a vehicle parked with its engine running next to the temperature sensor. From the Independent, July 5:
Record-breaking temperatures in Scotland last month have been declared invalid because a vehicle was parked too close to thermometers. Provisional figures from the Met Office had suggested 33.2C was reached at Motherwell on 28 June - the highest temperature ever measured in Scotland. But this has been discounted following evidence that a stationary vehicle with its engine running had been waiting near the relevant weather station.
To it's credit, WaPo has subsequently corrected Samenow's article on this point. How about anything else from Europe? Samenow has two examples, both from Ireland:
• In Ireland, on Thursday, Shannon hit 32C, its record.
• In Northern Ireland, Belfast hit 29.5C on Thursday, its record, and Castlederg hit 30.1C on Friday, its record
From Homewood:
As for Ireland, Shannon International Airport may have set a record of 32C [90F], confirmed by the Ireland Met Office as the highest temperature anywhere in the country last month. But this was also well below the all-time [Irish] record [of 33.3 deg C/92 deg F] at Kilkenny in 1887, not to mention the 20thC record of 32.5C [91F] [at Boora] in 1976.
And for Northern Ireland: The highest temperature in N Ireland [of] 30.1C [86.2F] [cited by Samenow], [was] well below the record [for Northern Ireland] of 30.8C [87.4F] set in 1976 and 1983.
Let's try someplace else. How about Montreal? From Samenow:
Montreal recorded its highest temperature in recorded history, dating back 147 years, of 36.6C on Monday. The city also posted its most extreme midnight combination of heat and humidity.
But our friend Homewood went digging in official Canadian data, available online, and came up with this:
Oops again! Looks like Montreal on August 1, 1975 was a full degree C (1.8 deg F) warmer. Samenow's article has not been corrected on this point, at least not yet.
You can go on with this as long as you want. As you can see, the failure of the atmosphere to warm in accordance with alarmist predictions is making it harder and harder to come up with a bona fide story that can scare you. They are reduced to cherry-picking some unrepresentative data points and leaving out all of the relevant context. It's no wonder the reporting on this is becoming increasingly scarce. For you, the moral of the story is, if you want some real information as to whether the world is warming or cooling, and by how much, skip the propaganda at the various Pravdas, and go for the UAH lower troposphere satellite record. It is available in the form at the top of this post, at drroyspencer.com, updated monthly.