Anyone who follows the climate debate closely, would have heard the recent announcement that July 3 and 4 were allegedly the ‘hottest days ever’. This claim, it seems, is as solid as quicksand, built on a shaky foundation of guesswork and political objectives.
The Untrustworthy Tapestry of Temperature Measurement
As Steve Milloy astutely highlights in his recent Wall Street Journal article, “Hottest Days Ever? Don’t Believe It,” the recorded average global temperature of 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit for these dates was derived from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. As Milloy notes, this system “relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.”
In the realm of scientific research, ‘guesstimation’ is hardly a term that inspires confidence. As Milloy succinctly puts it,
“there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hottest-days-ever-dont-believe-it-global-temperature-north-sole-poles-6e64a991?mod=opinion_major_pos4#comments_sector
The Misleading Mirage of ‘Average Global Temperature’
Furthermore, Milloy debunks the fallacy of ‘average global temperature’. He states,
“Average global temperature is a concept invented by and for the global-warming hypothesis. It is more a political concept than a scientific one.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hottest-days-ever-dont-believe-it-global-temperature-north-sole-poles-6e64a991?mod=opinion_major_pos4#comments_sector
Seasonal changes and regional disparities, as Milloy points out, severely compromise the concept of a singular ‘global temperature.’ For instance, temperatures rise during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer due to increased land exposure to sunlight, a fact conveniently overlooked by the climate alarmist contingent.
The Blind Spots and Blur in Climate Data
The issue of precision (or rather, the lack thereof) in temperature data is another issue Milloy brings to the fore. An alarming 96% of U.S. temperature stations reportedly produce corrupted data, and about 92% of them have a margin of error of nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit. So, next time you hear about a 1-degree rise in global temperatures, remember that the margin of error itself exceeds the supposed increase!
Our friends at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration present global temperatures starting from 1880, but regular temperature collection in remote regions like the north and south poles came much later. Can we really make meaningful and accurate comparisons when we’ve been effectively blindfolded for a significant portion of our observational timeline?
The Dilemma of Characterizing Earth’s Warming
As Milloy so eloquently sums up,
“It isn’t plausible to characterize Earth’s warming in a single average number, especially when we don’t really know what that number is today, much less from 125,000 years ago.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hottest-days-ever-dont-believe-it-global-temperature-north-sole-poles-6e64a991?mod=opinion_major_pos4#comments_sector
This, ladies and gentlemen, hits the nail right on the head.
So, the next time you hear the phrase ‘hottest day ever,’ remember to take it with a pinch of salt. Perhaps even a bucketful. After all, a touch of skepticism in the face of potentially misleading data can go a long way in keeping us grounded to the realities of our complex and ever-changing climate.
What’s your take on the ‘hottest days ever’ and the average global temperature controversy? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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I’ve developed a temperature reading about temperatures. Must be running a fever..
The reanaliser website that I’ve viewed (NZ 10/7/23 2145h) has on this link https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/ comments as follows …… “Special Notice, 8 July 2023
Climate Reanalyzer is a data visualization website for climate and weather models and gridded datasets. Climate Reanalyzer is NOT a model.” ……
This is at variance with Milloys statement about reanaliser using models.
Any comments?
It would be useful to point out anomalies in the relevant data sets
Not sure where 125,000 years ago data in this particular link is.
‘Climate Reanalyzer is a data visualization website for climate and weather models’
The word ‘model’ is in the quote
The saga of my tree vs the washing-line pole continues and deepens in mystery
(All the while trashing the notion that temperature controls climate)
I have 2 identical dataloggers,Accurate to 0.1°C in resolution and that they agree with each otherOne is affixed under a stand-alone (specimen) coniferous tree about 10m tallOther is affixed in wide open air/space off a wooden pole meant for the washing lineThey are about 30 metres apart and the whole area is (not really short) mown grass lawnVery rural location about 2 miles North of a small town.3metres above Mean Sea LevelThey record air temps at 3 minute intervalsWhat you see in the attached picture is a plot of the difference in temps that they recorded in the week starting 3rd July
The numbers on the x-axis is ‘Time’ ……..where 09 = 09:00 BST (UTC+1)………and 21 = 21:00 BST (9 in the evening UTC+1)Vertical axis is degrees CelsiusStraight off you see that it is cooler under the tree during daytime and warmer under the tree at night – by quite some good amount,
OK. Statistics
There are over 3,000 data points from each thermometer from the week’s exertions…
For the tree:
Add them all up and divide by ‘n’ gives an average of 17.8°CFind the Max and the Min – average of those 2 numbers = 19.5°CThe thermometer itself calculated an ‘MKT‘ of 17.86°CFor the wooden pole
Add them all up and divide by ‘n’ gives an average of 18.0°CFind the Max and the Min – average of those 2 numbers = 20.4°CThe thermometer itself calculated an ‘MKT‘ of 18.06°CMKT = Mean Kinetic Temperature (look it up and tell us what you find)
Most immediately notable is the difference in the Max/Min average vs the ‘all data’ average = nearly one whole degree Celsius.
Is Jennifer in the house?
MKT is an interesting concept – I ain’t quite got my head around it yet – help me out.
It is very interesting how despite the large day/night differences, the (add them all and divide) averages came out soooo close
But anyway – usual query = What was the temperature of my garden during the week of July 3rd through to 01:00 July 10th?
How might that mish mash of different numbers affect how anyone else measures and records temperature?
edit to add:
I chose those 9/21 times as tick-marks because of El Sol.
Not that he’s got anything to with climate but you’ve gotta have some sort of anchor/reference point
Esp, sunset in this part the world is around 21:30 (UTC+1) these days
Nature rules, models drool.
My take on the “hottest day ever controversy (?)” is that it’s mostly distracton – the warming trend is continuing its steady march. Skeptics are using every obfuscation trick in their book to try and keep people from noticing this. Milloy is a master at obfuscation and misinformation. That’s why fossil fuel interests and think tanks pay him so much to influence public opinion. That’s why WUWT readers continually fall for his nonsense.
“Milloy is a master at obfuscation and misinformation. That’s why fossil fuel interests and think tanks pay him so much to influence public opinion.”
Attack the messenger. Standard Operating Procedure. Got any evidence that Milloy is selling his influence to oil companies?
I’m not attacking Milloy. On the contrary, I’m complimenting him – he’s very good at his job of being an energy industry lobbyist. It’s rather odd that this person whose words you uncritically swallow is someone about whom you know apparently literally nothing. Does it ever concern you that protecting your belief system requires you to remain willfully ignorant of the people you view as thought leaders?
I don’t view people as thought leaders, I just view their thoughts. That’s how I judge things: What they say, not who they are. I don’t care who they are, all I care about is if they make sense or not.
I think it is you who is the one mesmerized by thought leaders.
For your information, fossil fuel companies have actually paid both skeptics and advocates of AGW. If I’m correct, Anthony took a picture of an Exxon or Chevron sponsor poster at one of the AGU conferences.
Milloy is an HONEST scientist
.. you should try it some day, instead of regurgitating junk science that you must know by now is just arrant nonsense.
As it is, you are neither honest nor a scientist.
“is continuing its steady march.”
Utter and complete BS… seems to be all you are capable of.
There has been no warming for the past 8 or so years.
There was no warming from 2001-2015
And little or no warming from 1980-1997.
The only warming has come at 2 El Nino step, and has absolutely nothing to do with atmospheric CO2.
El Nino is not causing the warming, there is no positive trend in the ENSO index:
https://psl.noaa.gov/enso/mei/
Rather, the warming trend is causing the El Nino peaks in the GMSAT to get higher and higher through time. The quasi-cyclic nature of El Nino peaks followed by La Nina valleys are producing the artifacts that you perceive as “pauses” because that is simply what it looks like when you add a linear increase to a sinusoidal function:
ROFLMAO.
There’s that simplistic children’s graph, which essentially shows you are totally CLUELESS about how ENSO works.
You are making an arrant fool of yourself..
Please keep proving the comedy routine
There is a fairly obvious corollary to that.
Does anyone have an opinion about the charts from Climate Reanalyzer?
Specifically this chart of sea surface temperature 60’S to 60’N summarized as one temperature value.
What does this mean in the real world, this chart specifically?
Thanks.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
Hyperventilating about global average temperatures and the imaginary devasting results reminds of the story about the statistician who drowned trying to ford a creek that was on average, 3 feet deep.
It can’t have been the hottest day everywhere because here, Vancouver Island or at least my little bit of it, it was 3C below the temperature in 2007. Until there is an accurate thermometer in every square metre of the world the “average” is a figment of someone`s overactive imagination.
Average Global Temperature
Recently concieved by
a global-warming alarmist*
Political , not scientific
Used for propaganda and fear-mongering
*1981 – James Hansen, first to attempt to estimate the global mean temperature to promote political beliefs. Hansen, a global warming alarmist, has been arrested at least four times.
Regarding “As Milloy notes, this system “relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.” This uses at least one weather model for infilling between temperature measurements, and temperature measurements include ones by weather stations, aircraft and ships. July 4 also had global temperature determined by the ECMWF model as 17.03 C, 62.6 F. https://twitter.com/CopernicusECMWF/status/1676934454877495296
EDIT to add: A major input to weather models is data from radiosondes aboard weather balloons.
“with a pinch of salt”. With spitting on the ground, I say!
Three days ago this was published it asked the question: Is “Global Average Temperature” a mirage?
There has been some disagreement.
It may or not be a mirage but it is being misused in either case. There are local climates around the globe. A few degrees warmer in some desert doesn’t effect humanity too much, a few degrees warmer in a food growing area might be a good thing. A few degrees warmer or colder on an icecap over the winter doesn’t mean much.
The global average temperature weighted by population density experiencing that weather might be more meaningful.
Excellent point. I have often made the point that spending on reducing CO2 should be done by how much of total CO2 is emitted by a country.
Global world temp is a joke. For a start, not that many years ago the starting point was 1850, so that must have been a problem given that its shifted to 1880. At that point lots of Africa had not or only just had been colonized so either there were no records or ones whose focus was ‘what can we grow here’ not exact meteorological measurements. South America likewise lightly thermometered. Post 1917, no stat from the Soviet Union is worth believing, nor from China post 1949; the global war 1939-1945 adds to the problems; and that’s before you get to national met offices busily ‘homogenizing’ the stats.Anyone who says we ‘know’ global temp 1880-present +/- 0.5C is basically trying to trick stupid voters.
As the climate analyzer is estimating a temperature rather than an anomoly, it is inevitable that the “hottest day” will be in July or August. It estimates that the average varies by around 2.5C every single year and the lowest average “ever” (since 1979) in July is higher than the highest average Oct-Apr. So what we’re really talking about is the highest estimated summer peak from 1979-present, a sample of 45 years (and looking for the anomaly map for the magic day itself makes it obvious the estimate is driven by places where it is estimated rather than measured).
Meanwhile, in places where people actually live, the “hottest day ever” was nothing special. Some places were hotter than usual, some cooler than usual, but mankind once again adapted itself to a range of temperatures *massively larger* than the spread of the estimated global average (let alone the even smaller spread in estimated global anomaly). If the new reanalyzer hadn’t existed, who would have noticed this oh-so-terrible-and-alarming day?