By Steve Goreham
This week the United States experienced the first major heat wave of 2025. Over 160 million people in the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast experienced temperatures approaching 100oF. Many in the media claim that the soaring temperatures are due to human-caused global warming. But a look at history shows that such high temperatures have been experienced many times in the past.
Extreme heat warnings were issued in Baltimore, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. The Washington Monument was closed due to the heat. Dozens of daily high temperature records were broken. Heat indexes, which combine temperatures and the effects of humidity, exceeded 100 in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and other locations.
Many media outlets reported that humans are responsible for the current hot weather. CNN reported that “heat waves are getting more dangerous with climate change” and that the current heat wave “bears the hallmarks of human-caused global warming.” NPR concluded that “human-caused climate change has made this heat wave three times more likely” due to emissions from “burning of coal, oil and gas.” Time stated that heat waves now occur “three times as often” in the United States as they did in the 1960s. But historical records do not support the media alarm about heat waves.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tracks state record high temperatures and the date when they occur. The data shows that 36 of the 50 state record highs were set more than five decades ago. Twenty-three state record high temperatures occurred in the decade of the 1930s, when annual human CO2 emissions were less than one-eighth of today’s emissions. Despite endless headlines about heat waves, only 6 state high temperature records have occurred since the year 2000.
New York City temperatures rose to 102oF at the peak of the heat wave. But the record high temperature for New York State is 108oF, set in 1926, 99 years ago, in Troy, New York. Memphis temperatures reached 95oF. But the record high temperature for Tennessee is 113oF, set in Perryville in 1930. Richmond, Virginia temperatures reached 99oF, but lower than the state record high temperature of 110oF, set in Balcony Falls in 1954.
Temperature metrics from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), NOAA, and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom (Met Office) show that average global surface temperatures have risen about 1.2oC (2oF) in the last 140 years. But is this rise caused by industrial emissions of greenhouse gases?
The Central England Temperature Data Set, provided by the Met Office Hadley Centre of the UK, is the world’s longest-running temperature metric. It shows that Central England temperatures have risen about 2oC (3.6oF) over the last 360 years, since 1660. Human carbon dioxide annual emissions were negligible until after World War II, but emissions have since increased by a factor of almost eight times. Yet the rate of change in the rise of Central England temperatures appears to be unchanged during the age of spiking global CO2 emissions. The evidence shows that temperatures are dominated by natural factors and that human emissions play only a small role in global warming.
Beware the high temperatures of heat waves this summer, drink plenty of fluids, and stay cool. Understand that temperatures in most locations have been warmer during past decades. Since nature drives Earth’s climate, our only sensible course of action is to adapt to climate change and rising temperatures.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
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These articles seem to be getting more frequent.
Seem? That’s not a very scientific observation. Though not surprising.
Don’t like your nose rubbed in the truth? Here’s some fresh red meat special for you:
The late John Brignall’s number’s watch had a warmlist page of all things caused by global warming. Now I thought that “Brain Fungus” was on that list but it’s not there. So maybe a Google search on “Global warming causes brain fungus” will find it. So here you go:
Google’s AI Overview says:
It is not true that global warming directly causes brain fungus.
However, climate change can indirectly increase the risk of
certain fungal infections that can affect the brain.
Maybe you could write it up and win a Pulitzer
Perhaps that’s because the number of panic stricken warnings about unexceptional warmth has increased in a hockey stick in recent years?
more frequent compared with when? Did the USA report on the 1963 winter in the U.K. or the summer of 1976 here in the U.K.? Almost certainly not. Would the extreme cold in Florida in January 1986 have been reported across the world other than in the context of the Challenger shuttle explosion?
Nowadays every weather condition anywhere in the world is instantly available, thus every event that appears to be extreme is taken completely out of context as there’s no reference to historical events.
“Would the extreme cold in Florida in January 1986 have been reported across the world other than in the context of the Challenger shuttle explosion?”
I remember that. There was ice covering the Space Shuttle before launch.
Right after that, I started volunteer teaching at the Elementary school my mother taught at, teaching fourth and fifth-graders about space science and astronomy. I felt like I needed to do something to keep up the kids enthusiasm for the subject of space. Didn’t have much audio-visual help back then. I would get astronomy magazines and other space science sources and lay them flat and take pictures of them with a Camera and then show them to the kids as slides, and then talk to them about them.
The Challenger Disaster was a serious mental blow to a lot of people. Happily, we recovered, and continued on.
The Elementary school won a Young Astronauts award from NASA the next year.
Very cool.
Introduction to The Hive Mind.
Internet. Cell phones. Social media. Digital media transformed from news outlets to corporate profit centers.
The number of articles about hot days not being spectacular increases just as rapidly of warmest articles about hot days being caused by GHG’s.
Since you feel the number of articles in either direction is indicative of something perhaps you could boldly say which type is correct?
… and the consensus says…
Very nice Steve. I figure it like this. Seventy degrees F is comfortable, if it’s cloudy and windy it’s cool, if it’s sunny and calm it’s warm. Eighty degrees is warm, if it’s cloudy and windy it’s cool, if it’s sunny and calm it’s warm. Ninety degrees is getting hot, if it’s cloudy and windy it’s nice, if it’s sunny and calm it’s hot. One hundred degrees is hot, if it’s cloudy and windy is very warm, if it’s sunny and calm it’s hot. If it’s one hundred and four (the record for my town) it’s very hot, if it’s cloudy and windy it’s still very hot but manageable, if it’s sunny and calm it’s more than very hot. I sit in my back yard in the shade with a nice cool drink of water even if it’s one hundred and four but never in the sun even if it’s sixty degrees.
And here on Whidbey Island, WA, we can’t get out of the 60s, in late June.
How to lie about the weather. The 1960’s were the “the ice age is coming back right soon now”, so an increase since then is deceptive. The 1930’s were the hot spell in the US, and that was 90 years ago. Then ignore Urban Heat Islands.
Deception galore.
Colorado’s record was set at a location in the hottest part of the state where reservoir construction was completed in 1948 and the station was moved among an increasing surrounding of asphalt several times. The last move was in 2016, and the record set in 2019.
Chances are, NOAA has fiddled with the Colorado temperature record. They do a lot of that. There’s a lot of temperature skullduggery going on with the Climate Alarmists. The global Hockey Stick is not the only bogus temperature record.
Go ask Tony Heller about Colorado’s temperature record.
Thanks.
Observe that a drought occurred in Central Plains of North America in the 1930s. In Canada and US.
Relatively recently another occurred but relatively further south, so little effect in Canada but substantial in Texas, perhaps not as severe.
(Farming practices were made somewhat protective by avoiding bare soil – bottom of grain stalks and roots were left to stabilize the soil.)
Notice the scaling of that y-axis. A 40C range!
Just goes to show how deniers have to minimize reality.
Frost as a low, body temp as a high, room temp right in the middle…..a very meaningful range….
A meaningful range reflects the data’s actual variation.
Lmao, not even the hottest deserts on Earth have an annual average of 40C.
This article is a f&%king joke.
It seems YOU are ‘a f&%king joke’, as you can’t even read a graph !!
The 0-40 red hockey stick line indicates CO2;
The blue line is temperature.
The blue line (CET annual average temperature) also has +40 (degrees C) as its upper temperature scale!
This for a data set who’s annual average temperature over centuries ranges from around +7C to +11C is an obvious and ham-fisted attempt to hide the changes it reveals.
And this from a website that regularly claims its opponents obfuscate data!
UAH, for example, uses anomalies (differences from a long term average, typically 30-years) to represent the data it depicts in a meaningful way.
Do that for CET, even using the very recent UAH anomaly base period of 1991-2020, and you get this (and you can see why they prefer to hide it):
The use of ΔT is only useful to know how a current point in time compares to a past period of time. Which past period is relevant.
Show us the same graph, only use 1920 to 1950 as the baseline.
The average temperature of the Sahara is less than 30 degrees Celsius as the nighttime temperature can be 0 degrees Celsius. The same is probably true for Saudi Arabia. The cloud cover is almost non existent, thus theres nothing to prevent heat loss during the night. What’s the average annual temperature of the Apollo 11 landing site?
Since there is low humidity in deserts, there is little greenhouse effect due to water.
Since there is low humidity in deserts, there is little
greenhouse effectheat retention due to water.Fixed it.
A meaningful range depends on what you are portraying. Of you want to maximise the visibility of small changes, for whatever purpose, you use the min and max of the data, with a small padding on each end, to define the range. If you want to demonstrate how small those changes are compared to to typical extremes, you show a different range. The fact is, a change of less than a degree is just not noticeable for most people, who would experience a much greater change by simply walking up a large hill. The range used in this graph reflects that reality.
How about absolute temperatures then? Let’s see the scale in Kelvin.
He’s not “denying” anything. Just pointing out a few salient facts.
It is a ‘salient fact’ that the lowest-to-highest range in annual average CET temperatures between 1659 and 2024 is +6.9 to +11.2 degrees C.
Despite this, the chart’s author chooses to set the upper end of its temperature scale at +40.0C, thus obfuscating the obvious warming trend in CET over recent decades.
Hide the incline!
1659 until about 1820 was the little ice age across Europe, as the U.K. is an island country the sea could prevent significant swings in temperature and cause a lag in temperature response.
Right, so why has an average annual temperature range of roughly 7-11 degrees C been set on a scale with 40C, nearly 4 times the average maximum, as its upper limit?
There is only one reason – to hide the modern warming trend that becomes obvious when the data are set out on a chart representative of their scale.
“as the U.K. is an island country the sea could prevent significant swings in temperature and cause a lag in temperature response.”
Which is why the CET is not a good reference for global temperatures.
The UK has a unique environment where temperatures are concerned.
Nobody is saying it is. It was introduced by the author of the article.
This doesn’t affect the point being made: that using a ridiculously high max value on the vertical axis is clearly a deliberate attempt to hide the incline contained in the data.
It is fake ‘scepticism’.
+1
People here love to whine about being called ‘deniers,’ sometimes even claiming it’s comparable to Holocaust terminology. But when you see stuff like this, it’s clear many so called skeptics aren’t skeptics at all.
‘Denialist’ really is the only accurate term. It’s crazy to think that these people believe they are smart enough to see what tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, and professionals somehow can’t.
We know from very simple calculations, using NASA CERES data, the strength of the greenhouse effect has not changed in the 21st century. You can read how to do the calculations here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/22/greenhouse-efficiency-2
NOAA radiosonde data also shows no change going all the way back to 1948. You can read about these calculations here:
https://scienceofclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/Miskolczi-2023-Greenhouse-Gas-Theory.pdf
This data tells us there’s been no increase in the greenhouse effect for at least 77 years. According to your climate priests the energy is “hiding in the oceans”.
So please tell us how energy that is hiding can cause any temperature increases in the atmosphere.
Oh right, you will DENY this scientific data until you are blue in the face. That’s what cultists like you always do.
Skeptics do not blindly accept based on an appeal to authority.
Einstein said that thousands could agree with him but it only takes one to prove him wrong.
Skeptics challenge and ask questions as all good scientists should.
Skeptic in the social context has evolved to mean doubter, but in science the definition is more concise. Do not accept just because someone says so.
Denialist is an severely objectionable term. Period. Cease and desist.
Your use is clear harassment.
Einstein would undoubtedly have opposed the incompetent and/or deceptive use of statistics like this.
Doubtful. Einstein had better things to do.
You do not know the definition of skepticism.
You are right. He should have used the range of -60C to +60C all of which exist on this planet. There are a few recorded extremes that go outside that range.
The upper temperature scale in the UK is 40c, so this is highlighting the trend is miniscule compared to the range of weather temperatures probable. The warming is tiny compared to what given temperature can occur on any day. Therefore hot temperatures in isolation have nothing to do with climate.
One heatwave has nothing to do with climate and never will because they always occur despite the climate.
Hide the incline!
And your approach is to exaggerate any little increase.
We have never had a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius anywhere in the U.K. since records began. The highest temperature that I remember was a single day in 1968 or 69 when a plume from the Sahara brought a temperature of approximately 37 degrees Celsius with high humidity.
40C recorded, how reliable, who knows!
July 2022:-
Coningsby, Lincolnshire: 40.3°C
Heathrow, London: 40.2°C
St James’s Park, London: 40.2°C
Kew Gardens, London: 40.1°C
Northolt, London: 40.0°C
Gringley on the Hill, Notts: 40.1°C
JohnC.
That was not a plume from the Sahara, but a heat Dome that that settled over part of England.
As opposed to you who would exaggerate reality.
My wife’s parents survived the Holodomor and had neighbors and friends disappear in the death camps.
Denier is an unacceptable term. It is severely offensive. I demand you cease and desist in its use.
It’s summer and the temperature gets into the 90s around here. It has every year of my 77 and i am sure it will continue to through my grandchildren’s’ lives.
Ah I miss the good old days when the news limited themselves to show the forcasted min/max temperatures, the weatherman made a nice comment about upcoming the sunny weekend and that we should enjoy ourself – life was good.
Today consists of idiots whining about “heatwaves” during the summer months (and of course all of them EXTREME and unprecedented but unable to tell me what they had for breakfast this morning), ignoring that unlike the recent years (I observed) the nights are cooling down significantly and that it is quite normal and frequent that temperatures in june can reach levels like in july/august.
People swallow that whorseshit because of short term memory, ignorance, lack of common sense and this utter stupdity of “just want to be part of the herd” (funny breed though, some crossover of sheep, parrot and slug).
Have a nice summer and enjoy it folks, midsommar is over the summer’s days are numbered. The countdown has begun and winter is coming…unsuprisingly like every year. Well except for Nicks and their permanent stroke…
Cheers and always keep your beers cold (here in southern Spain as well all over the globe)
“heat waves are getting more dangerous with climate change”
Any ‘climate change’ would be a result of fluctuating weather patterns, NOT a cause.
The UK has a ‘Marine Temperate Climate‘;
& when Stonehenge was built 5,000 years ago …
The UK had a ‘Marine Temperate Climate‘ (but, according to plant seeds found at the site, several °C warmer than now).
Geography & therefore proximity to the sun are the main drivers of a climate.
I would beg to differ, it’s not proximity to the sun as currently the earth is at aphelion, perihelion occurs in the Northern winter, instead it’s the direction that the poles are pointing that determines the seasons in non tropical regions and how many daylight hours there are.
He said climate, not current heat wave.
Got a citation for this? Preferably one that confirms that the seeds in question (should they exist) were proven to be indigenous to the region. (I have nutmeg in my pantry but nutmeg trees don’t grow so well at my latitude.)
“Got a citation for this? ”
YES thanks, but Your task is to research the subject, you may learn a few things about the history of the British climate on the way !!
“I have nutmeg in my pantry”
Could explain a lot about you (:-))
From the ‘let’s just make random stuff up and tell other people it’s their job to prove us wrong’ school of debate.
You seem quite adept at that process.
Please can I request that instead of or alongside temperatures in Fahrenheit you use the Celsius scale, after all this is meant to be a science based website which uses SI units pretty much everywhere else.
“this is meant to be a science based website which uses SI units pretty much everywhere else.”
So perhaps we should be using Kelvin, just to further confuse the Janets & toenails of this world (who can’t even read a simple graph) (:-))
I do agree with you on °C & °F until our American cousins catch up !!
We will never bow to SI! LOL
Historical records are so inconvenient! Would be so much easier if they could just pretend nothing had ever happened before. Oh, yea, that is what they have been doing all along.
From the article: “Since nature drives Earth’s climate, our only sensible course of action is to adapt to climate change and rising temperatures.”
Assuming temperatures are going to continue to rise.
Temperatures have cooled about 0.5C since the April 2024 high point, so they are not continuing to rise at the present time.
No, temperatures have not “cooled about 0.5C since the April 2024 high point”.
If you take the entire UAH data series from Dec 1978 to the April 2024 ‘high point’, then it shows a linear warming rate of +0.14C per decade; a total warming over the entire series of +0.66C.
Bringing that up to May 2025, despite the slight reduction in temperatures since April 2024, the warming rate over the whole UAH series has in fact increased from +0.14C to +0.15C per decade; a total warming over the entire series of +0.72C.
So the ‘cooling’ of about -0.5C in the brief period since April 2024, in fact represents an increase in warming of +0.06C when considered over the entire series.
This is explained by the fact that, although temperatures since April 2024 have fallen off slightly, they remain at historically high levels when compared to the series as a whole. Linear regression picks this up; eyeballing recent temperature fluctuations doesn’t.
This explains why short-term fluctuations are such unreliable indicators of long-term trends; also why short-term fluctuations are so beloved by ‘sceptics’ (but only when they go in a cooling direction).
0.95 down to 0.45 is half a degree. Read what was written, please.
Tom Abbott:
China and India have ramped up their SO2 aerosol emissions, causing some cooling.
From the article:”New York City temperatures rose to 102oF at the peak of the heat wave. But the record high temperature for New York State is 108oF, set in 1926, 99 years ago, in Troy, New York.”
New York City did exceed the heat record set in 1888 by two degrees F.
It was just as warm in the recent past as it is today. There is nothing special about the warmth we are experiencing today. There is no unprecedented weather today. The weather in the past was just as extreme as the weather today. CO2 has made no difference even though it has increased over the years.
CO2 is a benign gas, essential for life on Earth. There is no evidence to the contrary.
From the article: “Temperature metrics from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), NOAA, and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom (Met Office) show that average global surface temperatures have risen about 1.2oC (2oF) in the last 140 years.”
This issue has been deliberately confused by the Climate Alarmists.
The temperatures have risen since the end of the Little Ice Age, around 1850.
The temperatures increased by 1.2C (or whatever) from 1850 to the 1880’s, and then the temperatures cooled by an equal amount down through the early 1900’s, and then the temperatures again increased through the 1930’s by an amount similar to the 1880’s warming, and then the temperatures cooled by an equal amount down through the 1970’s (Ice Age Cometh! handwringing), and then the temperatures again increased by 1.2C (or whatever) to the present day.
So, yes, it has warmed by 1.2C (or whatever) since the end of the Little Ice Age, but it has done that three times,(and cooled off afterwards), not once (and no cooling), as the Climate Alarmists want us to believe, so as to fit the temperature increase into their CO2-caused-our-current-temperatures narrative.
Nearly everything FinalNail and his like post is factually correct, why you guys (and yes I am a true climate skeptic) downvote just because the facts offend your beliefs is silly.
The CET clearly has warmed quite dramatically in recent decades. One could correlate this to increasing atmospheric CO2, but then what caused a similarly fast burst of warming from about 1695, that clearly wasn’t anthropogenic CO2.
There is no direct link beyond reasonable doubt and good evidence that there could be natural causes. Or a combination, obviously.
All of the variation in that temperature graph from 1660 is well within the instrumental measurement uncertainty of the thermometers used over the nearly 400 years.
MrGrimNasty:
The burst of warming was between 1721 and 1727, and was caused by an absence of the volcanic eruptions that caused the LIA
IMO, a mannerless post with name-calling is a bad post even if otherwise correct.
Funny how this is happening at the peak of the current solar maximum and at summer Solstice, the longest day of the year.
Been seeing the usual breathless reports here in NC “may see record highs” (may)
Reality is most of the record highs for most cities are all in the 1900’s, a few since 2000, and the highest was 110 in Fayetteville, 1983 (as indicated on the map).
I have spent time this morning mulling over certain comments regarding the scaling of the temperature C and CO2 Gt graph.
There is a point to reflect on. Often we see objectionable graphics that emphasize one trend line at the expense of another. We should consider the possibility that the mentioned graph does it too, but in reverse.
I suggest it would be an interesting exercise to redraw the graphic.
Using the 1660 data as the start point baseline, graph the subsequent data as % change from the baseline, but with temperature based on delta kelvin and CO2 based on delta atmospheric concentration.
Both would be plotted to the same +/- scale.
CO2 would show a tread to ~ +50% and temperature would show a trend to ~ +0.5% with various wiggles + & -.
Just a thought. The point is we should not employ the same tactics of those trying to brainwash the masses into accepting appeal to authority as scientific proof.
You are missing the point of the graph to compare weather with climate. The weather temperature scale is much larger than climate so it is the elephant in the room and therefore what little background warming there is irrelevant.
Mungo Jerry’s song ‘summer time” basically rounds up everything relevant about the summer and roundly ignores all the irrelevant stuff
Sadly I didn’t come up with that genious song earlier, well I’m getting old I think 🤣
Here in Austin, Texas it gets hot in summertime. Always has always will. Since 1927 (98 years) we have only had 5 years where our high temperature for the year did not reach 100F (38C for our non-US friends). These occurred in 87, 79, 75, 73 and 68.
What are the odds of finding such an article or the information from it in The Guardian, on the BBC, CBC, CNN, NPR and all the other climate alarmist outlets that we exposed to almost every day? But if there’s some climate anomaly that produces extraordinary effect maybe once yearly, we don’t hear the end of it because it’s incontrovertible proof of man-made global warming.
It would be helpful to acknowledge the differences between CO2 emissions and anthropogenic emissions of CO2, which is what your figure shows. The public needs to know that 95% of CO2 emissions are from natural sources.
The image of US maps considers a temperature that matches a previous record as a new record and assigns the later date. The first date a record is set should be the date used.
e.g. Oregon’s 2021 “record” of 119 degF matched the real record set in 1898.