Guest essay by Alan Caruba
I am giving thanks this week, despite the heat wave, that I have not read, nor heard, a single claim that it is proof that global warming has arrived and we are all doomed.
By the time the global warming hoax was in its final days, we were being told that mid-winter blizzards were signs of it. Now the charlatans have switched their message, calling it “climate change” and this is so bogus that it defies description.
Of course the climate changes! It has done that from the billions of years before the first man climbed down out of the tree to stand upright; just in time to learn how to run like hell from whatever creature thought he would make a tasty snack.
I live in the Northeast and residents in the tri-state area face an entire week of temperatures in the upper 90s. The National Weather Service predicts the heat index (what it feels like outside) could hit 105 degrees. In 2006, about forty people died from heat stroke in New York during a heat wave from late July to early August. Most lacked air conditioning.
Curiously, the Earth is actually the farthest away from the Sun during our summer months. The way the National Geographic explained it the “Earth’s elliptical orbit means there will be a point each year when the planet is closest to the sun, called perihelion, and a point when it is farthest away, known as aphelion.” The aphelion was reached on July 5.
By contrast in January of this year Australia was undergoing a historic heat wave complete with wildfires in five of its six states. It set new records hitting 104.6 degrees Fahrenheit; summer in Australia runs from December to February. Far to the north, however, this summer has been the coldest on record in the Arctic and it is forecast to get even colder there towards the end of the month.
What I always find interesting is the way much of the population seems to have absolutely no memory of any previous heat wave or, for that matter, a major blizzard. Either way the news media goes bananas, usually seeing it an apocalyptic scenario. No, it’s just a perfectly normal heat wave or blizzard.
It’s a good idea to keep in mind these and other events are the “weather”, not the “climate.” The climate is measured in terms of centuries or, at the very least, decades. The climate is a trend. The weather is what’s happening outside today.
These weather extremes can be quite dramatic. Wikipedia notes that by 1851, half the population of England was living in towns while London had already grown into a major city. “Modern toilets appear on the scene before modern infrastructure, turning the Thames into an open sewer. In June 1858, a heat wave hit London and baked the river into a fetid mess.” A newspaper reported that “Gentility of speech is at an end—it stinks; and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.” The result was that Parliament moved upstream and anyone who could afford it left town.
In June 1976, England sweltered for fifteen straight days of heat in the ninety degrees and parts of the southwest went without rain for forty-five days. Forest fires destroyed trees and crops.
In August 1948 in the northeast, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities saw the temperature hit a hundred degrees and people flocked to air-conditioned movie theatres or to the airy beaches like Coney Island. I am old enough to recall the pre-air conditioned times before they became a common appliance in people’s homes and apartments. Electric fans provided what little relief there was to be found.
You don’t have to live in a city to endure a heat wave. During the Great Depression the 1936 heat wave that hit the Midwest turned farms into dust bowls and farmers lost their summer crops. It is estimated that some 5,000 people died. Chicago was hard hit and as far north as Toronto. The scene was repeated in 1995 in Chicago when an estimated 500 people died from heat-related deaths.
By the end of the week, Al Gore is sure to issue another one of his boring claims that the current heat wave is “proof” of global warming. Ignore him.
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First it was Global Warming, then it was Climate Disruption and in 2009/2010 (here in the UK) they started calling Climate change after a series of bad Winters and Summers.
As you have said (I’ve also been saying it since I first heard of Climate Change) it is a cover for the fact that the models were wrong.
The best thing here is to fight fire with fire and say Climate Change is a natural process that has been going on for billions of years (12,000 years ago most of northern Europe and America was under miles of ice and the Sahara was a lush green oasis).
They then have to prove that this is not the case, which is very hard to do 🙂
It’s 62 degrees tonight. Once again, my tomatoes will be late to set. Expecting highs in the low 80s for most of this week.
Anthony, I too remember the summers without air conditioning 🙂 We spent most of our summers in the Sierras to stay cool. Camping spots were free and safe. School started again in mid September and we had several weeks of high 95-110 degree days. Our teachers would turn off the lights to make it cooler. Maybe it helped. I can remember walking to the city pool and seeing the bank thermometer at 112 degrees. That was probably 1961.
“In June 1976, England sweltered for fifteen straight days …” – I remember it well. It was the year I started to suffer from hay fever. This week, the BBC linked the current high temperatures with climate change and suggested that it would create more hay fever sufferers. Funny, that.
I was made to do Climate Freezing maths just before the Summer of 1976. How many painful nights I had trying to put all this cooling to rest.
Since then I’ve read of “Glacier Girl” lost under the ice and of other things. To think we have any understanding of the weather outside of local effects is assine.
If, Polution and it’s reduction was the aim then I’d applaude that, but it isn’t. It’s some bogus BS that continues to stink.
Al Gore may you have many restless nights.
“….By contrast in January of this year Australia was undergoing a historic heat wave complete with wildfires in five of its six states….”
Sorry, nothing but hype.
Australia has had plenty of hot summers. This one was very normal: The satellite data shows that.
The dramatic headlines were based on doubtful surface measurements and some unspecified averaging:
“…The AWAP records from ground based thermometers are based on a method that still has not been made public. What we do know is that there were 700-800 sites (strange how the actual number so hard to state).
…….. less than half of those were operating in the 1930s and 1940s when we had our last major heat waves…”
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/06/australias-angry-hot-summer-was-hot-angry-hype-satellites-show-it-was-average/
Records supposedly bested (Hot, cold, fires, rain, floods) had occurred in years (where shown) listed in the ‘Angry Summer’ story:
1972, 1972, 1939, 2006, 1890, 1896, 1981, 2011, 1979, 1958, 2011, 2007, 1976, 1920, 1968, 2006, 1992.
The very fact that records of years, decades or even more than a century ago are only now being matched surely tells us more about the variability of the planet than it does of “sudden and dramatic change”.
Australia was undergoing a historic heat wave complete with wildfires in five of its six states. It set new records hitting 104.6 degrees Fahrenheit;
That makes as much sense as saying that the USA hit 104.6 degrees Fahrenheit. In many places in Australia a temperature of 104 degrees would be considered a mild day during the heights of summer.
Sort of like that idiot warmist who commented on a previous thread that said current weather patterns (obviously all caused by “climate change”) were going to cause big waves in Hawaii.
I nearly collapsed laughing, jaw still aches. 🙂
I struggle trying to recall the most-recent blizzard here in Perth, Western Australia. 😉
Too much is made of floods and bushfires. They are a well-known feature of land.
Much of the devastation wrought by bushfires on people has been brought about by “environmental” policies, limiting or banning the fuel-reduction burns that would deny fuel to fires and hence diminish the intensity of inevitable fires.
Similarly, policies have prevented the building of dams and the maintenance of catchments to maintain streamflows to provide potable water for a growing population. One that has tripled since e.g. the last major reservoirs for dringing water were constructed in the populated SW of Western Australia.
And in other areas, dams which would also serve as flood mitigation were never constructed due to environmental concerns. Floods have mainly impacted on people who’ve been settled onto floodplains. That’s been exascerbated by Climate Commissars insisting that the rivers will never flow again, etc. due to global warming.
And throughout, white elephants in the form of energy-guzzling desalination plants are constructed; benefitting nobody but the construction company.
And in Tasmania, they recently recorded the COLDEST day on record in Tasmania.
Interestingly, on that ONE hot summer day in Sydney, they said the record was 45.8C, but I looked the next day, and the automatic weather station summary for the hot day only recorded a maximum of 45.3C. This is the same record maximum temperature from 1939.
After all the warming we are meant to have had, finally we reach the same temp as 74 years ago.
US Death Valley didn’t even come close to the 1913 record did they ?
@Bernd,
I was at a meeting of some of the top “water” guys recently, they were discussing the climate models.
Their conclusion was that the models have ZERO skill in predicting changes in precipitation.
Different models come up with a range of something like +/- 20% change in what is already basically guesswork. ZERO SKILL !!
Which is probably more skill in the climate models wrt temperature.
last sentence should have read…
Which is probably more skill than the climate models show wrt temperature
interestingly the UK alarmists have stopped linking heatwaves to global warming sometimes in the summer of 2011
http://omnologos.com/monbiots-silence-wrong-kind-of-heat-as-orange-groves-refuse-to-attack/
This is because everybody likes NICE weather in the uk for a change after months of cold and damp darkness. If warmth could be linked to CO2 emissions people would leave their cars running on empty, I’m sure.
AndyG55, the recent Met Office annoucement on future precipitation for the UK gave a range of -30% to +20%, meaning that drought is a bit more likely from the model runs, but who knows?
This was taken up by Krebs and others (you’d think a real scientist like Krebs wouldn’t be so easily fooled) as proof of dire things to come – somehow the -30% figure draws attention, and the fact that the range covers mainly “nothing to see here” is ignored.
Reminds me of the forecast for the 2009 winter. Met Office said it would be colder (30% chance), average (30% chance) or warmer (40% chance) than normal. All the media read this as predicting a mild winter. After the event of the coldest in donkey’s years, the met Office pointed at that they has predicted average or colder at 60% likelyhood!
We should remember that “IPCC” stands for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was established in 1988. To my knowledge there has never been an Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming.
If you make your models predict a large enough range, one of then is bound to be right.
Didn’t works so well for climate temperature models though, did it. 😉
The twisting of the language is a serious weapon that is used by a certain type of personality, and honest people do not know how to deal with it. It is a political tactic. We saw it used very effectively in the EU debate by the people who set up the Euro currency who used exactly the same strategy, they used the same methods as has again been re-used by the perpetrators of the AGW scare: they took control of the media, refused proper debate, when debate was unavoidable they labeled opponents xenophobes and little Englanders, they invented bogus statistics about job dependency, when facts proved them wrong they changed their arguments and adopted the facts as reason for more, not less monetary union.
Truth and facts are not enough to win against these people. To win you really have to reverse their language. An example of reversing is countering the word “denier” into “cult” and “believer”. Another is to reverse reporting of statistics, as has been achieved with simple memorable phrases such as “no temperature increase for 17 years” and “their models have failed”.
To speed up the process new concepts have to be created to carry the message through. For instance UHI is not understood, really it needs to be “Urban Heat Pollution” or “Temperature Pollution”. And phrases about homogenizing and adjusting of data has to be rephrased to become “tampering with the temperature record”. Honest people are always uncomfortable with this sort of use of language because they believe in long winded debate and well defined language. In debate they have strength, but in the media their instinctive honesty is a weakness.
omnologos says:
I worry about the UK if the temperature does start to take a dive.
Their energy infrastructure is trashed. Is not going to be nice for them at all.
So, I posted on a Calgary newspaper comment section that according to the flood report commissioned after 2005, the level of flooding (catastrophic, unprecedented) we experienced last month is considered a 22 year event.
The response I got before they locked comments was “that can’t be right, where was the flood in 1991?”.
I’m pretty sure most people who frequent WUWT know that a 22 year, or 100 year event don’t happen at those times like clockwork. This is why we need better education about climate. NOT “climate voodoo”, but actual climate as we’ve experienced it for millenia,
‘Of course the climate changes! It has done that from the billions of years before the first man climbed down out of the tree to stand upright’ of course there was and there was always a reason! Such as
‘Nearer our own time, the coming and going of the ice ages that have gripped the planet in the past two million years were probably triggered by fractional changes in solar heating (caused by wobbles in the planet’s orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles’
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11650-climate-myths-global-warming-is-down-to-the-sun-not-humans.html
But they have no influence presently. So what is the forcing agent at present?
AGU, global warming and co2, with Richard Alley.
I spent the last 3 years commuting between southern Germany and Zurich, Switzerland. Each winter I was astounded, at the first major snowfall on the motorway, to see Swiss people failing to slow down, sliding off the end of corners, crashing into each others cars, and generally behaving as if they had no experience of snow whatsoever.
I figure that if Swiss people, some of the most careful and considerate of drivers anywhere in the world, cannot remember that in Switzerland it snows every year, then I cant expect anyone else to remember what happened 6 months ago …
“June 1976, England sweltered for fifteen straight days of heat in the ninety degrees”
And what a bloody damn fine summer that was! At boarding school in the north of England we considered ourselves extraordinarily blessed to be relieved of the interminable gray skies and rain, slated to occur some 230 days of the year.
The summer lives on in my memory today, as vivid now as it was then. So it was always very, very easy to be a “skeptic.” The emotion preceded the science.
Here in Virginia we are now in a sort of brief mild heat wave, with temps in the middle to upper 90s for highs and 70s for lows for five or six days; unpleasant, but far from unique. We are now at the highest CO2 levels since humans started keeping track. Our tomatoes have not ripened because the spring and early summer never got hot. Perhaps they will do something now. I know–this is weather, not climate. Suspicious nonetheless: if CO2 is such a driver of higher temps, why this cool summer? Surely cause-and-effect still operates as a principle. Of course it does–CO2 is merely not the only cause (and has probably already maxed out), and other causes have not yet been considered adequately in the warmists’ litany of dire effects.
Human memory is selective and partial.
That is why we keep records.
There is nothing normal, average or unexceptional about the massive preponderence of hot records over cold records for the last few decades. Whatever you call it that indicates a trend in the climate. Undeniable, inelectable and exceptional.
If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natura’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records. Human memory may be unreliable, but the objective data are unarguable. The climate has been and is warming.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/06/26/warm-temperature-records-dramatically-outpacing-cold-records-in-washington-d-c/
I have posted this before elsewhere but it is relevant to this post
UK Climate and Control Charts
“Weather and climate experts from across the UK came together at the Met Office’s HQ in Exeter today for a workshop to discuss the recent run of unusual seasons in Europe.”
“Today’s included sessions which looked at the weather patterns and their potential causes in three recent seasons – the cold winter of 2010/11, the wet summer of 2012, and this year’s cold spring.”
From personal experience and a casual glance at the Met Office temperature figures it struck me that the variations seemed pretty much what we expect from our UK weather.
As a manufacturing engineer I was introduced to the wonderful world of control charts so I decided to construct these for the cold winter of 2010/11, the wet summer of 2012, and this year’s cold spring.
For those not familiar with a control chart an example is deciding if variations in a machine’s output is just normal or if the machine needs adjustment.
To decide if everything is OK the Mean and Standard Deviations of the data are computed and the upper and lower control limits are calculated and plotted on the chart of the data. The control limits are the mean plus and minus three times the standard deviation. These limits represent the edges of the normal distribution curve, so anything outside these limits is considered abnormal.
You can see the results at
http://oldgifford.wordpress.com/