The narrative that the Earth is currently experiencing its warmest temperatures in over 100,000 years has some problems, according to some top climate scientists. Cliff Mass, a meteorologist who specializes in weather prediction and modeling at the University of Washington, claim in an interview that the public is being “misinformed on a massive scale.”
All through July we’ve been deluged with pronouncements of “hottest ever” days, weeks, and months. Earlier this month, UN Secretary-General António Guterres proclaimed that “the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
Is the planet essentially “boiling,” or is the secretary-general engaging in some hyperbole for effect?
The latter is true if you ask Mass, who believes the exaggerations of this summer’s heat aren’t good for anyone.
“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,” Mass said.
“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,” he stressed.
According to Mass, the climate has been “radically warmer,” particularly about a millennium ago, when the Medieval Warm Period occurred. For a time from 900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., Europe recorded that growing seasons were extended, grapes grew in Northern England, and Greenland — now essentially an ice island — was colonized.
“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,” Mass said.
“Global warming, it‘s a serious issue, but it’s a slow issue, it’s not an existential threat,” he concluded.
Certainly, the summer of 2023 has been a warm one in certain areas of the world — but is it record-breaking? Is it the warmest summer in 120,000 years, as many climate hysterics claim?
Well, since global temperature records — if they can even be reliably calculated — only go back as far as 1979, it’s an impossible question to truly answer. But many weather observers appear to be saying, “it’s probably not the warmest.”
“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,” said John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville.
In Christy’s mind, the extremely high temperatures of this summer may be due to mankind’s intervention, but probably not because of greenhouse gas emissions. They more likely are due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.
“In Houston, for example, in the center it is now between 6 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding countryside,” Christy pointed out.
In fact, not even the vaunted IPCC is completely assured that this summer’s temperatures are all-time highs.
“Neither the UN IPCC nor the US National Climate Assessment have high confidence in detection or attribution of trends in heat waves [in] the US[.] So either the IPCC is wrong or the media/activist scientists are wrong. Pick one,” said Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Nevertheless, true believers in the climate hoax are claiming that this summer represents a turning point where global warming can no longer be denied.
“We’re just really starting to see climate change kick in,” climate researcher Nathan Lenssen told The Washington Post recently.
Even failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discussed the warm weather recently.
“Hot enough for you?” Mrs. Clinton tweeted. “Thank a MAGA Republican. Or better yet, vote them out of office.”
Of course, no Republican — MAGA or otherwise — has the power to heat up the Earth, although Mrs. Clinton’s supply of hot air could probably warm some regions.
There is also evidence that is being largely ignored by mainstream media and climate hysterics that the current year’s heat could be due to factors not man-made at all. The 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano spewed large amounts of a greenhouse gas — water vapor — into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Many scientists are concluding that this year’s higher-than-average temperatures have more to do with an excess of H2O in the atmosphere — not CO2.
“Unlike previous strong eruptions, this event may not cool the surface, but rather it could potentially warm the surface due to the excess water vapor,” said a study from scientists at NASA and NOAA.
But studies like that one don’t fit the narrative that man’s emissions from fossil fuels are the sole culprit for global warming, so it is pushed aside for the shrieking rhetoric of climate hysterics. But if one studies a little bit beyond those shrieking headlines proclaiming doom, one finds that the truth, as far as climate change goes, is much more nuanced and far less frightening.
