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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Dr. John M. Ware
In the UK we are having a nice spell of very hot weather and curiously our tomatoes in the greenhouse haven’t ripened yet and I wondered why, perhaps they need an early spring to get them going.
With some of the hot weather hype I’ve heard lately I’m surprised we survived 40-60 years ago without air conditioning and the like growing up in Eastern North Carolina. I really think most of the weather reporting is over done to gain viewership and advertising dollars: tune in and we’ll tell you how bad it’s going to be. It’s mid-July and the Richmond (VA) weather is typically hot. I’m not sure I can really tell the difference between 92°F and 95°F.
The GWPF has a story today about how Reuters is now backing away from Climate Change coverage. Expect more of the same from other major outlets in coming years….
http://www.thegwpf.org/global-cooling-reuters-downgrades-climate-coverage/
H.
I remember the 1976 UK heatwave – I was 13 years old and lived in Plymouth, Devon. The southwest of England was hit very hard by the ‘drought’ of ’76, water reserves got so low that stand-pipes were introduced (for the first and only time in my life so far) and every household in every street had to collect their water rations by the bucket load from one stand-pipe at the end of the street.
But mostly I recall it was a long, gloriously hot summer holiday off school. ‘Jaws’ had just come out and there were already rumblings of a ‘fantastic-looking’ new science fiction film called ‘Star Wars’ or something coming in ’77… Halcyon days. I’d go back tomorrow.
1976! Oh What a Year! Endless summer, ladybird invasion, a Minister of Drought being appointed just days before the rain returned in earnest, Elton John and Kiki Dee top of the charts from July to September, and Southampton FC winning the FA Cup. Happy days…..
Henry –
not just Reuters, hopefully. David Shukman on BBC World has just done pieces in California & Texas, which were relatively CAGW-free on TV, tho i note he manages to slip the subject in in the text below:
(includes video) 14 July: BBC: The receding threat from ‘peak oil’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23280894
blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 2:19 am
It must be CO2, because he doesn’t know what else it could be. Forget 4,000,000,000 years of history and lets look at the last 150 years with the continuously “adjusted” data. If he was correct the computer models based on his beliefs would be correct and they’re not. What’s more arrogant? Man caused global warming, or man can stop global warming.
forgot to add the fracking link, tho i can’t see the actual video from the broadcast posted as yet:
16 July: BBC: David Shukman: US to begin exporting ‘fracked’ gas
But for the moment, a shale gas boom, made possible by fracking, is under way in the US with every prospect of it growing for decades to come.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23317370
For Alan Caruba and others, here is bad weather from the past in the media. It’s horrible and is a sure sign of a steady state climate, when co2 was below the safe level of 350ppm. 😉
(Scroll down to go back in time)
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/bad-weather/
Peer reviewed Holocene climate extreme events by Jimbo (very horrible)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/01/claim-recent-el-nino-behavior-is-largely-beyond-natural-variability/#comment-1351897
@Alan Caruba – I guess we are about the same age. I too remember the days when houses had fans, not central air. On hot summer night (just a few hundred miles south of you), we laid still in the bed hoping for a whiff of a breeze to evaporate the sweat from our bodies. Daytime was spent at a pool, under a hose, or at a beach. We were lucky. We had beaches.
In the mid 70s I had a job working outside. fortunately it was not hard manual labor (just a huckster at a theme park). I remember wringing my shirt out as it was so saturated with sweat that it was not damp, it was soaked. We have not duplicated that string of temperatures since then.
Weather changes. Climate changes. Those who grow old and realize this basic truth of life are the wiser for it. Those who sulk and stomp their feet like petulant children because the summers and/or winters of their maturity are not the same as their youth never grew up. A span of 70 years is nothing in the scheme of climate. Yet it is the span of a man’s life and so what was, he thinks should always be.
Anthony Watts see this:
“Polar ice melt may be natural event”
http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/polar-ice-melt-may-be-natural-event-1-3001226
“Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability”
B.Wouters, J. L. Bamber, M. R. van den Broeke, J. T. M. Lenaerts and I. Sasgen in Nature Geoscience
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1874.html
“New study indicates need for continuous satellite monitoring of ice sheets to better predict sea-level rise”
http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2013/9589.html
Here in the east, we are in the middle of the coolest, wettest summer in my 40 year memory. Due no doubt to CO2 induced warming…
Can we just get this right once and for all? There was no media or leftist conspiracy to call AGW ‘climate change’ rather than ‘global warming.’ It has long been called climate change in scientific circles (hence the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1988) … you can go back to the early 1900s for more references). Within the public lexicon, it was Bush word man Frank Lutz who sent out the memo that the term ‘climate change’ be used, because “global warming” sounded too scary.
I lost credibility for the corporate-hired non-scientist (Caruba, a PR guy) as soon as I read his inaccurate echo-chamber-inteded second paragraph.
Henry says:
July 16, 2013 at 4:19 am
‘The GWPF has a story today …………’, but:-
‘The use of factually inaccurate material without a legitimate basis in science is an abuse of the foundation’s charitable status, which is all the more reprehensible because the public is more trusting of pronouncements made by charities’
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/lord-lawsons-climatechange-think-tank-risks-being-dismantled-after-complaint-it-persistently-misled-public-8659314.html
Global Warming and Climate Change mean different things and always have done. Getting your facts straight is a pretty important skill if you want to be taken seriously.
Mikeyj says:
July 16, 2013 at 4:48 am
‘blackadderthe4th says:
July 16, 2013 at 2:19 am
It must be CO2, because he doesn’t know what else it could be’, because
Only 500 million years of evidence that CO2 is a GHG and heating up the planet!
izen says:
“If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natura’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records.”
Now that’s climate change denial; the climate stasis hypothesis. Hmmm. Glacial maximums and minimums are pretty well established events. Hypothesis fail, try again.
How exactly does man-made warming look different than natural warming?
:Izen says:
July 16, 2013 at 3:44 am
“There is nothing normal, average or unexceptional about the massive preponderence of hot records over cold records for the last few decades. ”
Your statement confirms yet ignores the well known warming trend since the Llittle Ice Age.
Natural Climate Change in action. There’s no CO2 signal there. There’s no CO2 acceleration per the Doomsday Cult.
Is this a reason to cripple Western prosperity and cede hard-won freedoms to the government?
I think not.
Ask yourself where your liberty comes from. Then ask youself who convinced you to cede liberty for the sake of “The Planet”
First answer. Brave soldiers, Many of whom died doing it.
Second answer Government fed bureaucrats, many of whom will get rich doing it..
How big does a lie have to get for your ilk to recognize it.?
Notable weather extreme. DFW not equivalent to Death Valley. DFW, July 15th, 2013, maximum temperature = 74. Previous Lowest Max = 79 in 1900.
“”Julian in Wales says:
July 16, 2013 at 2:01 am
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. “”
Indeed Julian, It was the language of CO2 alarmism that made a skeptic of me.
This is an old post of mine:
The Man-Made Global Warming scam/lie/hoax becomes evident when one looks at the narrative that spews from the alarmists: Only evil and suffering can come from a warmer Earth. Fossil fueled, Western style prosperity must stop. This is the real agenda. Saving the Earth has little to do with it. Even if all the CO2 causes warming “theory” were true, It still does not absolutely dictate doom.
I say, why can’t it be? :
“Congratulations children, The Energy sources that fuel our economies and our prosperity, give us long life and comfort, these fossil fuels will also cause our planet to warm gently, about 2C degrees over the next century. What luck!
With the warmth and extra CO2 for plant life, millions of acres of tundra will become forests. Millions of acres of frozen steppe will become arable. Starvation will end. Prosperity will reach even the poorest people. We must keep searching for and burning oil and coal so we can improve our climate and prosper. Humanity will become wealthy. With this wealth we can preserve habitat for animals, protect the rain forest. We will clean the oceans and the land. Our future is bright. We are entering the age of abundance. “
Ah, the good old days. My schools did not have air conditioning until my senior year. (Gee, thanks for waiting that long.) North Carolina can have some hot summers. And the bad part is that the hottest of the hot days has no breeze. I remember many days where we were let out early due to the heat. And these weren’t days in June to August. We had early days due to heat in May and September. And there were many hot days where we weren’t let out early too. The bus ride home provided no relief either because it didn’t have AC either.
blackadderthe4th says: “Only 500 million years of evidence that CO2 is a GHG and heating up the planet!”
Not anymore. Temperatures have flat-lined lately, despite rising CO2. The models have been refuted. Your ignoratio elenchi won’t work here, aspgrasper.
Ah, yes. Summer of ’76 in the UK. At RAF Mildenhall we yanks threw the biggest three-day party of the century to celebrate the 200th anniversary of our independence. It began with an evening of dancing in a hangar to Glenn Miller music and culminated on the 4th of July with a three hour, 21 minute airshow featuring the Red Arrows and more than 40 other aerial demonstrations to a crowd of 185,000. Nobody minded that water conservation measures had allowed us only one-half inch of water in which to bathe, or that the temperatures were in the 90’s and the fens were sere and cracked. What a summer.
Actually, Buzz, we have noticed that in recent years folks are trying to rebrand “manmade global warming” as the uber flexible “climate change”
If you’re trying to run a scam, climate change is a great term.
izen says:
Human memory is selective and partial.
That is why we keep records.
Human records are selective and partial.
That is why we keep our sense of perspective.
Doing so helps us avoid saying supremely stupid things like:
If the climate was just exhibiting ‘natura’ variation then the incidence of records would be decreasing and equal for cold and hot records.
Uh, no. That would only be true if the climate never changed. That would definitely NOT be natural. Anyone with a proper perspective of the span of human weather records vs the range of climate variation understands this.
Climate change is natural. Using the term “climate change’ to refer to something that is by definition unnatural is a political technique used to make gullible idiots forget basic facts.