More False Cries Of Dangerous US ‘Heatwaves’
We told you a few months ago that summer heat was coming and you need to get ready to douse the hype
On cue Heatmap attempts to run a thoughtful piece on the mid-June heat wave in North America but fails, because while insisting that so-called ‘attribution science’ is slow, careful and uncertain they yell “Climate change is almost always an exacerbating factor in the case of something like a heat wave or a heat dome” and then quote someone with the alarmist favourite outfit World Weather Attribution that:
“When you’re looking at heat extremes, there is almost always a climate change signal. I don’t think there’s ever not been a climate change signal since I’ve been doing it in the last couple of years.”
If you always get the same answer maybe your machine is stuck.
“With heat waves, it’s the same answer every time: It got hotter because it’s got hotter.” (Yes, an actual quotation from a WWA expert.) Why, “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that the kind of heat waves that would have occurred once in a decade before the Industrial Revolution now occur almost three times more frequently and are 1.2 degrees Celsius (or 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer.”
But how do they know how frequent heat waves were before 1776? Simple: They made it up. They have no idea.
As we observed last year, it is true that if the planet generally is a degree warmer than it was 150 years ago, it is probable that hot days as well as cold will be a degree warmer. So far so obvious, and not proof of anything except a natural cyclical rebound from the Little Ice Age.
Indeed it would be amazing if the world were not warmer than in Dickens’ time, though the pernicious habit of measuring temperatures at airports does call into question how much warmer it is.
Moreover since ‘climate change’ is when the climate changes, it is bizarre to go about saying that when the climate changes there’s a “climate change signal”, confusing an identity with a causal relationship.
But how much warmer is it in fact?
Back when the expression was invented that it was hot enough to “fry an egg on the sidewalk”, which originated in the 1930s, the decade with the worst actual heatwaves in the detailed American climate record, nobody claimed it was hot enough on the adjacent lawn.
Nowadays they frequently treat the tarmac as representative. But in any case, on what possible basis do they assert that heat waves are more common?
As was pointed out during the brutal 2021 northwestern heat dome, more American temperature records were set in the first half of the 20th century than the second half. Tony Heller chimed in with his usual archival research to contribute that:
“The percentage of the US to reach 90F by June 23 was 19th lowest on record since 1895. Fakest ‘record heatwave’ ever.”
As he also noted:
“Only 31 percent of the US has reached 95F (35C) during June, which is sixteenth lowest since 1895.”
Moreover, CFACT contributed on Thursday June 19, 2024 that:
“In spite of claims which you might hear from the news media this week, extreme heat is not on the rise in the U.S. Since 1895, of the top 15 years with the most number of 95° days, 13 of them occurred before 1960.”
Let’s see attribution science blame those ones on ‘climate change’. Or the fact that while it was hot in the American Northeast in particular last week, a lot of the country had below average temperatures and some parts even saw snow.
If it’s hotter, shouldn’t it make it hotter? And if global warming is global, shouldn’t it at least affect all of a country?
Heatmap instead argues from authority:
“There have, of course, always been heat waves. But it is with high confidence that scientists say they are hotter and last longer now than they would otherwise because of climate change.”
Actually the IPCC is not very keen on attribution science. And as we’ve said before, it’s silly to talk this way because ‘climate change’ doesn’t cause changes in climate, it is changes in climate.
If things are hotter and worsely hot, something besides it being hotter and worsely hot must be the cause. In that sense it’s a mere truism that if it’s now hotter, and more often hot, then the climate has changed.
It’s not an explanation. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Here we must remind everyone that, as Tony Heller points out repeatedly, we have very few reliable weather measurements for much of the world before 1940 and almost none outside the Anglosphere before 1890.
And add that we have none at all before 1700. Temperature proxies used for reconstructions before that time give some clue as to climate, the sorts of conditions that prevailed for decades or even centuries in a given locale, but they simply don’t operate with sufficient precision or on a short enough scale to offer any evidence at all regarding weather.
We have anecdotes, including brutal heat waves. But since people didn’t use to assume that bad weather was the end of the world or proof of Original Sin, they didn’t go whimpering every time it was hot in summer. (Nor did they spend a lot of time saying it feels hotter than it is to ramp up a scare. Once upon a time heat was just heat.)
It was warmer globally in the four previous Warm Periods (Medieval, Roman, Minoan and Holocene) than it is today, and not because of CO2, let alone ours.
And were heat waves more common and more awful then? It stands to reason. But we don’t know.
Journalists keep raving about “record-high temperatures”, without even waiting for them to happen. But records since when? If it was hotter in 1200, or 49 BC, what’s to rave about?
Likewise, when a New York Times “Climate Forward” columnist writes: “The National Weather Service has warned that the heat wave could be the longest one some places have experienced in decades” we want to ask whether, if there were longer ones decades ago, it indicates that what we’re experiencing is “heat in summer” not the end of the world as we know it.
As when the same author says “Already this year, India has experienced what its top weather official described as the country’s longest hot spell on record” we ask how good the records are and how far back they go, because the fact that things now get written down doesn’t mean they didn’t use to happen.
And another thing. Longer is not a synonym for “more frequent”. And indeed as we have also discussed before, the crucial element in a “heat dome” isn’t heat, it’s an atmospheric block.
Unless you can prove that they are becoming more common, due to ‘climate change’ or something else, you cannot predict more heat waves.
Unless of course you’re an attribution scientist, in which case you can predict that anything is caused by ‘climate change’… once it happens.
As noted in an earlier post this week, Canada’s Minister for Emergency Preparedness Harjit Sajjan Xed out:
“Environment and Climate Change Canada can now directly link extreme heat waves and human-induced climate change in just days.”
Well sure. When you have a machine that blames everything bad on ‘human-caused climate change’ it doesn’t take long.
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Header image: EC English
Bold emphasis added
Editor’s note: heatwaves, certainly in the UK, are increasing, but not for the reason people are led to believe. For decades, the Met Office definition of a heatwave was seven consecutive days above the average temperature for the time of year. Then about 10 years ago, they changed it to three consecutive days, thus allowing the claim that heatwaves are becoming more common.
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