More Fabricated Nonsense About The ‘Hottest Evah’
Journalists are meant to be skeptical. But not on trendy causes, at least not in recent times
Thus a piece in The Daily Digest starts out “It seems impossible but some people still deny climate change science” and continues, beneath a caricature of Donald Trump:
“We all know somebody who thinks this ‘climate change stuff’ is a bunch of hogwash. Forty years ago, it was easier to understand, but as of late, it is pretty mind-blowing that some people can have this level of cognitive dissonance.”
But does the journalist (who we doubt was even around 40 years ago) really know such a person?
Or are they only talking to one another, and failing to examine assumptions or check facts because it’s, like, mind-blowing that anyone could disagree with us, man? But at a certain point even journalists sometimes check the details, and that’s when it really gets mind-blowing.
MSN ran the headline “US weather: Heat explosion to smash America in freak 20C winter heatwave” and said:
“The US is about to roast in a freak winter heatwave as a plume of sweltering air surges up from the tropics.”
Still, it’s a kind of progress that they then noted it’s a freak event, not a trend, and the heat is coming from the tropics not from your SUV.
And they also noted how cold weather elsewhere was breaking records in Alaska, even thickening fuel oil so furnaces and stoves stopped working, while NBC took notice of a snow storm that dumped two feet of snow on California.
These days we count it lucky when a story says “Norway hit by hurricane-force winds: Is climate change making Europe’s extreme storms worse?” and answers by saying “Unsurprisingly, many across the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and other storm-hit European countries this winter will be wondering whether climate change is partly to blame” then admits it’s not.
As in:
“This is the furthest through the list we have ever been at this stage,” a Met Office weather service spokesperson confirmed to Euronews Green last week.
But since storms only started being named in 2015, it’s not the best way of measuring climate change impacts.
‘It’s quite a complex issue and not quite as simple as [the] increasing frequency of heatwaves in the UK as a result of human-induced climate change,’ they added.”
Even though ‘human-induced climate change’ is not increasing the frequency of heat waves, nor has the UK seen an increase.
Meanwhile in The Atlantic an article that started “California’s Climate Has Come Unmoored / The weather of catastrophe is here” soon went on to detail how “unmoored” California’s weather has always been, from Joan Didion’s 1968 “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse” to “The damage from the 1862 flood was so bad that it bankrupted the state.”
But it then concludes that, as everybody knows, everything has changed:
“Meteorologists have described it [the 1862 flood] as a once-in-30,000-years disaster, but there is reason to believe that another one could come much sooner, because the planet is warming, and warmer air holds more moisture.”
Again, the narrative has run away from the facts. On purpose, it seems.
The flood that might be coming is more real, far more real, than the one that actually did come.
The British Red Cross advises that:
“In the coming decades, it is predicted periods of hot weather and heatwaves will be longer and more extreme.”
Note the passive voice, which makes it hard to check who made the prediction. But we tried anyway, and found instead that according to the official British Met Office the UK in 2023, the “Hottest year ever”TM, the hottest day came in September and the heatwave in question “would not have been particularly unusual” during the summer, adding:
“The seven consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 30°C in the UK was the longest such spell on record with the previous longest runs five days in the Septembers of 1929 and 1911.”
Given the urban heat island effect it is fair to say that in fact a stretch of hot weather in September 2023 was nothing out of the ordinary, having happened a century ago, possibly more frequently.
Especially since, the Met adds of the September peak of 33.5°C at Faversham in Kent, on the 10th, that “While this is a notably high value it was not record-breaking, falling well short of the UK September record of 35.6°C set at Bawtry (South Yorkshire) on 2 September 1906.”
Yes, 1906.
What’s more, the hottest day of the year rarely comes so late, having “only occurred in September on four previous occasions in 2016, 1954, 1949 and 1919.”
So it’s episodic, cyclical and typical.
Except that in this hottest year ever, Britain didn’t break 30C in August, didn’t break 31C in July, and didn’t break 33C in June.
The tendency nowadays is to rely on theory not evidence. For instance in the New York Times “Climate Forward”, Manuela Andreoni writes of storms and flooding on the American east coast and south to Louisiana that:
“So far this week, Californians have not seen the kinds of weather-generated disasters that struck last winter, with flooding in Ventura County in December and in San Diego in January, my colleague Jill Cowan reports.
Storms are part of the natural cycle that replenishes the water supplies that several states will rely on during the drier months to come, Judson Jones, The Times’s meteorologist, told me.
‘The problem comes when there’s too much at one time,’ he said. Climate change makes that a lot more likely. Warmer air holds more moisture, which means storms in many parts of the world are getting wetter and more intense, as my colleague Ray Zhong explained during deluges last year.
Coastal areas are especially vulnerable to climate change, not just because of storms and floods, but from rising seas and erosion.”
OK, more likely, you say. Though the amount of extra moisture isn’t specified and would, you’d think, at least reduce drought.
But the real question is whether it’s actually making it more common. Climate is a complex phenomenon even in a world where many things are more complex than some people seem to think.
There are a lot of hypothetical mechanisms that could operate and might be worth testing if the result they could produce actually seems to have arrived.
But is the U.S. having more flooding?
As we’ve noted, California has been notorious for cycles of searing drought and inundating floods since anyone started keeping track.
As for, say, Louisiana, the U.S. National Weather Service (yes, we have Google on our computers, apparently unlike many journalists) says “On this page you learn what types of flooding are typical in Louisiana”.
Types, you’ll notice. Not just one. And it lists “Significant Louisiana Floods in 2005, 1927, 1965, 2011 and 1995.
The 1927 event, aka the “Great Mississippi Flood of 1927”, was “the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States”.
A century ago. Before there was climate.
Still, everybody knows that if something bad happens now, or something unusual, it’s proof that climate is way more climatic than it was before it was.
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