Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Euronews reports that climate change is the biggest threat to tourism, according to a travel commission CEO. This is nonsense. Weather has always interrupted travel; the CEO and Euronews did not even try to cite any data demonstrating it is becoming more common. Tourism is so huge in Europe, that the term “overtourism” is being used to describe the conditions of popular European cities that are experiencing huge numbers of visitors.
Euronews reports that climate change is the biggest threat to tourism, according to a travel commission CEO. This is nonsense. Weather has always interrupted travel; the CEO and Euronews did not even try to cite any data demonstrating it is becoming more common. Tourism is so huge in Europe, that the term “overtourism” is being used to describe the conditions of popular European cities that are experiencing huge numbers of visitors. Sometimes violent anti-tourist protests are breaking out in some European cities. Based on recent protests, if anything is threatening tourism there, it is the backlash against visitors in various popular European locations.
The ETC, according to their website, “is a non-profit organization representing the national tourism organizations of Europe.” Santander explained that tourism makes up 10 percent of Europe’s economy, and 10 percent or more of the GDP of Spain alone. Santander proceeded to say that tourism infrastructure needs more investment because of the pressures of “overtourism” causing congestion at airports and in the visited communities. He then goes off the rails and claims that “climate change is the biggest threat to tourism right now, by far.”
Euronews quotes him as citing anecdotes like train service interruption “because the rails are expanded because of the heat,” and cruise lines being unable to enter some European rivers due to drought causing falling water levels.
The truth is that bad weather has and always will impact tourism. Deadly or severe heat waves are not unprecedented for Europe, nor are their impacts. This is especially true regarding drought: one need look no further than the reappearance of “hunger stones” – ancient drought-indicating markers in European rivers and lakes which show that severe drought in fact occurred multiple centuries before industrialization.
The article also claims that people are fleeing hotter vacation destinations for cooler ones. It is true that more of the cooler parts of the world are seeing more tourism, but so are the warmer locations. Indeed, tourism is booming in many countries as greater numbers of tourists explore beyond historically popular destinations, including colder locales. Overall, France saw the busiest summer tourism season in 15 years this year. Data from this year showed that tourism increased more in parts of France like Normandy than they did on the French Mediterranean coast, but numbers are still well above pre-pandemic levels.
It is almost certainly not the heat itself, tourists looking for a beach vacation expect and want the heat… except that perhaps American tourists would rather not stay in the hotels that lack air conditioning.
If it were true that global warming was making it so that people were abandoning hot destinations, places like Mexico would be seeing declines, but this is not the case. Mexico’s attractive areas have also seen increased tourism despite known dangers, and Mexico is much hotter than France. Mexico’s tourism has surpassed pre-pandemic tourism levels such that it is expected to be one of the top five most-visited countries by 2040.
This year, Spain is expected to surpass its all time record for tourist visits. The Canary Islands are warm year round, and saw a record breaking year last year for tourism.
Recently, the massive increase in tourism has become so stressful to some European city residents that protests against tourists have broken out in France and Spain, again the two places where climate change is supposedly threatening tourism.
In France, residents complain about the “Disneyfication” of parts of Paris, overcrowding has led to strikes and unrest. In Spain it is worse: protests have broken out in Barcelona, the Canaries, and other locations, some involving violent confrontations this year and in 2025.
Just because weather and transit disruptions in some locations can cause tourists to modify their vacation choices, does not mean that climate change is a huge threat to tourism. Despite knowing that the numbers are improving almost everywhere, Euronews and Santander decided to exaggerate the threat in order to give lip service to the climate agenda. At the same time, they are deflecting blame for European policies and the actions of some of Europe’s citizens that discourage or make tourism less welcoming.
The Boston Globe claims in “Climate change fueled the extreme heat in Europe. New England is next,” (subsequently retitled, “What two continents’ heat waves tell us about the climate crisis”) that today’s heat waves bear the unmistakable fingerprints of human-caused climate change and that New England should expect more of the same. This is false.
The Boston Globe claims in “Climate change fueled the extreme heat in Europe. New England is next,” (subsequently retitled, “What two continents’ heat waves tell us about the climate crisis”) that today’s heat waves bear the unmistakable fingerprints of human-caused climate change and that New England should expect more of the same. This is false. The historical record shows that severe and deadly heat waves have always occurred long before modern greenhouse gas emissions became a political issue, and the Globe ignores both that history and the significant biases that make today’s heat waves appear more unprecedented than they really are.
The Globe leans heavily on an analysis from the World Weather Attribution Group claiming Europe’s recent heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, quoting one scientist saying, “At this point, your default assumption has to be that there was some influence.”
That statement says more about modern climate attribution than it does about the weather.
World Weather Attribution begins with climate models that assume carbon dioxide emissions are causing warming and then estimates how much warming human CO2 emissions have contributed to a particular event. Those studies are not direct observations. They are model-based exercises built on assumptions about how the atmosphere would have behaved in an alternate world without increased greenhouse gases. Climate Realism has debunked individual attribution “studies” and the methodology used to produce them multiple times previously. Models don’t provide data, and attribution studies are case studies in Garbage in, Garbage Out or GIGO, a phrase developed by computer scientists to describe data manipulation through biased inputs.
The Globe never asks the more fundamental question: Have severe heat waves occurred throughout history? The answer is loudly yes. See the table below.
The historical summary table of significant heat waves dating back to 1743 makes one thing abundantly clear: current heat waves are not unprecedented. They aren’t record setting in any meaningful way rather they are part of a long history of naturally occurring extreme weather that spans nearly three centuries.
Climate at a Glance reaches the same conclusion. Its review of U.S. heat waves shows that the United States experienced more frequent and intense heat waves during the 1930s than in recent decades. That conclusion is based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observations, not computer model projections.
The Globe also suffers from what might be called historical reporting bias.
Today heat waves dominate news coverage because every event is instantly reported by thousands of newspapers, television stations, websites, blogs, podcasts, and millions of social media users. Search engines permanently catalog every article, photograph, and video. None of that existed a century ago, hence the bias favoring the present.
When a major heat wave struck in 1901 or 1911, coverage was limited to local newspapers, wire services, and government reports. Many events outside major cities received little documentation. Plus, countless historical heat waves simply never made the jump from paper to enter the modern digital record.
Comparing today’s flood of Internet coverage with sparse newspaper archives from a century ago inevitably creates the false impression that heat waves are becoming more common when in reality, modern reporting has become dramatically more comprehensive.
The Globe correctly notes that Europe experiences more heat-related deaths than the United States. But the article largely glosses over the most important reason: lack of air conditioning. In fact, much of Europe works to suppress air conditioning use.
The Globe acknowledges that nearly 90 percent of Massachusetts homes have air conditioning while only about 20 percent of European homes do. That single fact explains far more about the difference in mortality than discussions of greenhouse gases.
According to the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, air conditioning is one of the most significant public health interventions in history, averting hundreds of thousands of premature heat-related deaths annually. By dramatically reducing vulnerability to extreme heat, residential cooling has become a critical lifeline, especially for the elderly and vulnerable populations worldwide. There is another factor the Globe never mentions: the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI).
Climate at a Glancedocuments that cities routinely record significantly higher nighttime temperatures than surrounding rural areas because asphalt, concrete, brick, and buildings absorb solar energy during the day and slowly release it overnight. These elevated city nighttime temperatures are especially dangerous because they prevent people from cooling off while they sleep, creating heat exhaustion or even worse, heat stroke.
UHI also make temperature records in major cities more common not because the ambient temperatures is hotter but because the UHI increases temperatures when compared to the surrounding countryside. This also biases urban and regional climate trends.
Ironically, many of the cities highlighted in heat wave reporting, including Boston, Paris, London, and New York, are among the most urbanized environments in their respective regions.
Boston itself has quite a heat wave record. Boston’s all-time heat record is still from 1911. The city reached 104°F on July 4, 1911, and that record has stood for 115 years. If man-made greenhouse gas warming was producing ever-more-extreme heat, one would expect the all-time record to have fallen by now. It hasn’t.
Because Boston has nearly 150 years of instrumental temperature data, we don’t need climate models to know whether heat waves are unprecedented there. See the table for Boston heatwaves below.
The city’s historical record shows heatwaves in Boston are not unprecedented.
Funny how the Globe missed reporting on that.
The Globe further suggests that this week’s New England heat wave shares the same atmospheric pattern as Europe’s because both involve persistent high-pressure systems. That’s called weather; climate is tracked over 30 years.
Heat domes, blocking highs, and persistent ridges have produced dangerous summer heat for centuries. They existed before industrialization, before SUVs, and before climate attribution studies. Their occurrence does not, by itself, demonstrate human influence.
Weather events happen because of atmospheric circulation. Climate trends emerge over many decades, yet there is no multidecadal trend of worsening or more frequent heat domes – just more alarming and frequent reporting on them.
The Globe closes by suggesting heat is now “front and center in ways that it hasn’t been before.” That is true, but it says more about today’s media and technology than today’s weather.
Never before have we had thousands of news outlets, smartphones, live weather apps, satellite imagery, social media feeds, and twenty-four-hour cable news turning every heat wave into a global event. The weather has not suddenly become more newsworthy. The media has become far more capable of amplifying it.
The Boston Globe is derelict in its duty of responsible reporting, by not placing the present heat wave in historical and meteorological context. Scary headlines about “unprecedented, climate change driven,” heatwaves may sell papers and make for good clickbait online, but it represents false and shoddy journalism.
In recent days his administration has slammed the door on every possible avenue of global cooperation on the environment. At the same time, it is sending the message that it wants the world to be awash in fossil fuels sold by America, no matter the consequences.
In recent days his administration has slammed the door on every possible avenue of global cooperation on the environment. At the same time, it is sending the message that it wants the world to be awash in fossil fuels sold by America, no matter the consequences.
Under President Trump, the United States has become the only nation to renege on a pledge to try to keep warming to 1.5 degrees. Its actions will make the global fight harder, scientists said.
“Emissions will be higher,” warned Justin S. Mankin, an associate professor at Dartmouth College who researches climate variability. “Trump’s greenhouse gas emissions will cause Trump’s heat waves, Trump’s droughts, Trump’s floods, and Trump’s wildfires.”
…
“The science is clear that every action matters and every ton of carbon matters,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech. “There’s a price to pay for every ton of carbon we produce, and that price is being added to our global debt.”
Witch hunts increased during the Little Ice Age The Aztecs had one advantage over our climate experts—they realized the sun was responsible for global warming A University of Cincinnati professor blamed the rise of Hitler on global warming.
Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer in 2017 drew parallels to today’s man-made climate change claims. “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100 per cent science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed,” Happer quipped.
[Note: According to The Salem Witch Trial judges: “Five of the nine judges had attended Harvard, though only William Stoughton, Samuel Sewall and Nathaniel Saltonstall had graduated.” — On 27 May 1692, Sir William Phips, the newly appointed royal governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, appointed nine of the colony’s leading magistrates to serve as judges for the newly created Court of Oyer and Terminer. When Phips sailed into Boston from London on 14 May, there were already 38 people in jail for witchcraft, and the accusations and arrests were growing daily. One of the governor’s first official acts was to create this special court to deal with the growing crisis…Governor Phips carefully chose men he described as “persons of the best prudence.”… All nine were members of the Governor’s Council, and most of them had served as judges for many years. Many had even been on panels that had heard previous witchcraft cases.]
This is the title of a January 2026 article on Watts Up With That? A site often skeptical of mainstream climate narratives. It critiques a scientific paper on a North Atlantic marine heat wave, arguing that loose definitions of “heat waves” (e.g., temperatures exceeding historical percentiles) and ecological impacts lead to over-attribution of ordinary variability or broad warming to specific “extreme” events caused by human-induced climate change.
This reflects a broader debate: Are modern heat periods overly labeled as unprecedented “heat waves” driven by climate change, or does evidence show genuine increases in frequency, intensity, and duration?
This is the title of a January 2026 article on Watts Up With That?
A site often skeptical of mainstream climate narratives.
It critiques a scientific paper on a North Atlantic marine heat wave, arguing that loose definitions of “heat waves” (e.g., temperatures exceeding historical percentiles) and ecological impacts lead to over-attribution of ordinary variability or broad warming to specific “extreme” events caused by human-induced climate change.
This reflects a broader debate: Are modern heat periods overly labeled as unprecedented “heat waves” driven by climate change, or does evidence show genuine increases in frequency, intensity, and duration?
A recent study published in Science Advances (January 2026) titled “Major heat wave in the North Atlantic had widespread and lasting impacts on marine life” examines a significant marine heat wave (MHW) centered around a sharp temperature rise in the subpolar North Atlantic in 2003.
A recent paper in Science Advances bears the authoritative title “A major heat wave in the North Atlantic had widespread and lasting impacts on marine life.” The phrasing is careful but decisive. A single physical event is asserted, and its ecological consequences are presented as both extensive and enduring. For readers accustomed to climate-ecology literature, the implication is clear: an extreme climatic anomaly occurred, ecosystems responded, and the link between the two is sufficiently established to justify confidence.
The paper positions itself as both synthesis and analysis. It compiles physical temperature records, surveys a wide range of ecological indicators, and proposes that the year 2003 marks a pivotal moment—a thermal disruption that reorganized the North Atlantic marine ecosystem. The ambition is not modest. The authors are not merely cataloging observations; they are advancing a causal narrative.
Early on, the paper states its central premise plainly:
“Here, we test whether this sudden and stark rise in temperature classifies as an MHW, examine the physical drivers behind it, and investigate its impacts on marine ecosystems.”
This sentence does a great deal of work. It asserts the existence of a “sudden and stark rise,” presumes that classification as a marine heat wave is a meaningful exercise, and then moves directly to impacts. What it does not do is pause to ask whether the quantities being connected—“the MHW” and “marine ecosystems”—are defined with sufficient precision to support causal inference. That omission is not incidental; it permeates the paper.
The first weak link is the marine heat wave itself. Despite the strong connotations of the term, the paper does not identify discrete heat-wave events in the ocean in any physically intuitive sense. Instead, it constructs a metric based on threshold exceedances. Temperatures above the 99th percentile of a historical reference period are counted across 88 different time series and summed by year. The resulting aggregate is labeled “MHW frequency.”
The authors describe this as follows:
“We define an MHW as any temperature exceeding the 99th percentile of the 1870–1969 reference period and count the number of MHWs each year.”
What is being counted here is not events, but exceedances. A single basin-wide warm anomaly can inflate this number dramatically if many correlated locations cross their thresholds at once. The metric is therefore sensitive not just to temperature, but to spatial coverage, data density, and correlation structure. Calling this “frequency” suggests a count of independent occurrences. That is not what the method produces.
This matters because frequency implies repetition, recurrence, and increased likelihood of impact. But what the paper is really tracking is the spatial coherence of warmth relative to a chosen percentile. A broad warm year will look like many heat waves, even if it is physically one phenomenon. The distinction is blurred, then forgotten, as the narrative advances.
The construction becomes even more problematic when the temperature data themselves are examined. The paper combines gridded sea-surface temperature fields with point-based, subsurface observations at approximately 100 meters depth. These are not interchangeable measures of “heat.” They respond to different processes, operate on different time scales, and interact differently with biological systems. Yet they are treated as equivalent contributors to a single index.
The ecological side of the ledger is even less well defined. The paper repeatedly refers to “ecosystem impacts,” “abrupt changes,” and “widespread responses,” creating the impression of a well-established baseline from which deviations can be measured. In reality, the baseline is an assemblage of disparate observations drawn from incompatible sources.
The paper itself hints at this breadth:
“Evidence for ecosystem change was compiled from a wide range of peer-reviewed publications and stock assessment reports spanning multiple trophic levels.”
That breadth is presented as strength. But breadth without standardization does not produce a baseline; it produces a mosaic. Fish stock assessments, plankton indices, benthic surveys, and fisheries-dependent data are all governed by different assumptions, sampling strategies, and human influences. Each has its own implicit reference period, often shifting over time. The paper does not reconcile these differences. It aligns them temporally and treats concurrence as coherence.
Many of the changes described are qualitative judgments elevated through repetition. Terms like “abrupt,” “sudden,” and “marked” recur throughout the cited literature, yet formal tests against null models of natural variability are rare. A change that appears striking within a short observational window is implicitly treated as exceptional, even though the historical envelope of variability is poorly constrained.
The problem is compounded by the retrospective nature of many ecological baselines. Species “expansions” are often inferred from first detection rather than systematic absence. Abundance shifts are inferred from improved surveys compared against earlier, less reliable data. Once an event like 2003 is identified as climatically noteworthy, ecological observations are naturally reinterpreted in its shadow.
The paper leans into this alignment explicitly:
“The 2003 MHW coincided with abrupt ecosystem changes across multiple trophic levels.”
Coincidence is doing a great deal of work here. Temporal overlap is treated as explanatory, even though the mechanisms linking a basin-scale temperature anomaly to diverse ecological responses are not rigorously established. Fishing pressure, regulatory changes, survey redesigns, and market dynamics—all of which profoundly shape marine data—are acknowledged only peripherally.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of fisheries data. Stock redistributions and abundance changes are presented as ecological responses, even though fisheries systems are deeply socio-ecological. Changes in quotas, targeting strategies, and detection technology can produce “abrupt” shifts in reported distributions without any underlying biological reorganization. The baseline, such as it is, quietly assumes that fisheries outputs reflect ecological truth rather than human behavior layered onto ecosystems.
The paper goes further, invoking regime-shift language that carries strong causal implications:
“The observed changes are consistent with the characteristics of regime shifts previously identified in marine ecosystems.”
Yet no formal regime-shift detection is performed. There is no change-point analysis, no state-space modeling, no statistical demonstration that 2003 represents a structural break rather than a conspicuous point in a noisy, evolving system. Consistency with a regime-shift narrative is asserted, not demonstrated.
Perhaps the most revealing moment comes when the authors acknowledge a tension they do not resolve. Later periods show similarly high values of the heat-wave metric, yet the ecological responses appear less dramatic or less well documented. The paper notes this, then moves on. But this observation undermines the central claim. If the same “forcing” produces different outcomes, either the forcing is not well characterized, or it is not the dominant driver.
At no point does the paper seriously consider the possibility that the baseline itself is unstable. North Atlantic ecosystems were not in equilibrium prior to 2003. They were already responding to decades of fishing pressure, nutrient changes, and circulation variability. Treating the late 20th century as a stable reference state is a narrative convenience, not an established fact.
In the end, the paper offers a compelling story, but not a disciplined causal argument. A loosely defined marine heat wave is paired with a loosely defined ecological baseline, and the two are joined by temporal coincidence and confident language. The synthesis feels objective because it is large and comprehensive, not because its foundations are secure.
What is presented as evidence of causation is better understood as plausibility structured into a narrative. That distinction matters. When weakly constructed quantities are allowed to support strong claims, uncertainty is not reduced—it is concealed.
The danger is not that this paper alone overreaches. The danger is that this style of reasoning becomes standard: correlation framed as causation, baselines inferred rather than established, and skepticism replaced by accumulation. That is not how complex systems are understood. It is how stories harden into doctrine.
Heat waves are typically defined as prolonged periods of abnormally hot weather relative to local norms, often lasting 2–3+ days with temperatures exceeding a threshold (e.g., 90°F in parts of the U.S. Northeast or percentiles like the 90th–99th of historical data).
Definitions vary by region and agency—no universal standard exists—leading to criticism that relative thresholds make more events qualify as “heat waves” in a gradually warming world, even without changes in variability.
Critics argue this creates a perception bias: a hot spell that was normal in the past becomes a “heat wave” today due to updated climatology.
Severe heat waves are not new.
The 1930s North American heat wave (amid the Dust Bowl and Great Depression) caused over 5,000 deaths, with widespread 110°F+ temperatures and prolonged drought—some U.S. records from then still stand.
Other notables include Europe’s 1757 and 2003 events, Russia’s 2010 wave, and pre-industrial extremes like China’s 1743 wave (44.4°C in Beijing).
This just in. Canadian companies convicted of burning up planet after show trial. Hydrocarbon bureaucrats sentenced to economic death. As you see, this breaking news caught me on the road here in this hotel. But somebody has to say something. So for the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is our quick reaction response to the pseudoscientific claim that Canadian companies are destroying the earth a bit.
In this video, John Robson deconstructs the recent attempt to indict hydrocarbon fuel producers and deprive the world of 80% of the primary energy it needs. The transcript is in italics with my bolds and added images.
This just in. Canadian companies convicted of burning up planet after show trial. Hydrocarbon bureaucrats sentenced to economic death. As you see, this breaking news caught me on the road here in this hotel. But somebody has to say something. So for the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is our quick reaction response to the pseudoscientific claim that Canadian companies are destroying the earth a bit.
And that response is that this court has no legitimacy at all. What it’s doing is no more science than what Lysenko did. It’s politics in a wig and ugly politics at that. According to a media friendly study in Nature, complete with its own lurid press release, sorry, news article:
The weather attribution wizards have nailed not just human CO2, but yes, individual firms for causing bad weather, and they shall be sued into extinction. After all, this new weather attribution was invented to bypass the tedious necessity of detecting trends in weather before explaining them, for the very purpose not to facilitate understanding, but to facilitate lawsuits.
As Roger Pilke Jr. recently growled while examining a hatchet job on the US Department of Energy skeptical red team climate report, he said, quote, “In my areas of expertise, he had found numerous statements that were simply false. among them that world weather attribution was not created with litigation in mind.”And how does he know that that claim is false? Because he did actual research, including finding a quotation from WWA’s chief scientist, Fredericke Otto:
Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.”
Of course, it was. And here we go. As the Nature propaganda said:
Legal experts say it’s a line of evidence that could feed into climate litigation that focuses on specific events such as the 2021 heatwave that hammered the US Pacific Northwest in 2021. Already, a county government in Oregon has filed a 52 billion US civil lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for contributing to that event.
So, it’s revealing, and not in a good way, that the Nature Study itself credits upfront “approaches promoted by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative and other Methods.”
Alarmists don’t love Weather Attribution because it conducts fair trials. They love it because it convicts everybody with roughly the subtlety of Andrey Vyshinsky or Lavrentiy Beria. But it is not science. As Patrick Brown pointed out this January, their tricks for stacking the jury box include, in this case, in order to attribute droughts to human evil and folly, they overwhelmingly studied places where drought had increased, even though globally there were more places where it decreased. You know, just in case their models let them down, but they’re not likely to. [See Beware Claims Attributing Extreme Events to Hydrocarbons]
As we noted in June, dizzy with success, the fellow travelers at CNN touted a study where:
“Using a combination of scientific theory, modern observations, and multiple sophisticated computer models, researchers found a clear signal of human-caused climate change was likely discernable with high confidence as early as 1885.”
That is before the invention of the internal combustion automobile. Now, the obvious implication here, and the correct one, is that these models would find such a signal anywhere because we’re told that in 1885, atmospheric CO2 was around 293 parts per million, just a whisker above the 280 parts per million that alarmists wrongly believe was constant in pre-industrial times. That very small change couldn’t possibly have measurably affected the weather. Such a fluctuation is very obviously noise, not signal. Especially when it’s coming from ice cores whose bubbles take decades or even centuries to seal.
Yet the source here tells us that in 1885 it was 293.3 parts per million. And this mathiness looks impressive, but it’s actually another key warning sign that something that is not science is lurching about in a stolen lab code. Real science deals in uncertainties. It shows error bars. Fake science bludgeons the public with spurious decimal places. According to the CBC’s credulous take:
“I was surprised that even the smallest carbon majors were actually very substantially contributing to the probability of the heat waves, said Yan Quilkai, a climate scientist at ETHZurich, who led the study.”
Oh, come now. Surely you suspected your rigged models would convict the defendant of a serious crime. After all, it’s what they’re for. And here we go. The study allegedly found that major oil companies alone caused more than half the supposed 1.3° C warming since pre-industrial times. And that of that share, Canadian companies caused 0.01°C.
I mean, one might retort, De minimis non curat lex ( The law does not concern itself about trifles.) if not educated in a government school, but instead in Latin or in sound constitutional and legal principles. Or you might say, get the heck out of my lab if you’ve been educated in science because there is no way, no way at all that 0.01 out of 1.30 is signal and not noise here.
Now to his credit or that of the shattered remains of his conscience, nature’s Jeff Tollefson does admit that:
“despite the eyepopping estimates for responsibilities allocated to individual carbon majors, the uncertainties remain high in many instances in large part because the most extreme heat waves are statistically rare.”
Yeah, indeed they’re so rare that there’s no statistically sound way of determining how likely they are. As we pointed out in our turning down the heat waves fact check video with regard to that 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome that the alarmists so love:
“The heatwave could be viewed as virtually impossible without global warming. But it was virtually impossible with it as well. Sometimes weird things happen.”
What’s more, World Weather Attribution’s gleeful attribution of it to humans and our carbon original sin was eventually submitted to a serious journal and so rubbished by one of the reviewers that they had to add a bunch of disclaimers saying that of course they couldn’t really know. But did it dent their popularity or their self-confidence? Hooha. This study in Nature says, “The median estimate indicates that climate change has also increased the probability of heat waves by more than 10,000.” 10,000 what? we ask. Percent? Times?
But it gets worse because this kind of talk suggests that they know how common and intense heat waves were around 1850, and how common and intense they are now. But they don’t. They have no idea. There weren’t systematic measurements of daily temperature in most of the world even into the mid 20th century. And the proxies when you go further back certainly give no idea how common or intense they were even a century ago, let alone 500 years.
So, they’re making it up, then hiding it with decimals, saying in a spreadsheet attached to the study that, for instance, Cenovus Energy alone increased the probability of an early 2009 heatwave in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania’s northern provinces by 1.01% and its intensity by, get this, 0.003°C. Four decimal places. As the Duke of Wellington once said, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”
It’s also anti-scientific to claim to give a change in global temperature to two decimal places over the last 175 years when nobody knows the temperature anywhere to within one decimal place a century ago. And another thing we actually do know that during the Holocene era the earth has cycled regularly between warmer and cooler periods including down from the medieval warm period into the little ice age and back up after 1850.
So at least some of the warming since must by any logical standard have been natural. In which case they’re blaming oil companies alone for more than the entire human contribution. But the attributors duck this absurdity by absurdly assuming that it’s basically all on us. The chutzpah here is astounding. But it’s exactly the kind of thing they do.
And if you use the same warped modeling to assess the shares of some other human activity, you’d dependably get a searing indictment. And in fact, if you used it on all of them, I’ll bet you you’d get over a 100% of that 1.3 degrees C, never mind if whatever smaller share actually wasn’t natural. But they don’t run that kind of test because what they’re doing isn’t science. They’re not seeking truth and testing theories ruthlessly. They’re zealots shrieking about enemies of the people.
They also write:
“with reference to 1850 to 1900, climate change has increased the median intensity of heat waves by 1.36°C over 2000 to 2009, of which 0.44°C is traced back to the 14 top carbon majors and 0.22°C to the 166 others. These contributions correspond respectively to 32% and 16% of the overall effect of climate change.”
And again, it sounds precise, all right, but climate change is a statistical description of changes in long-term weather. It isn’t a causal force. So, they don’t even know what climate change is. And all those double decimals swirling around trying to hypnotize you are a dead giveaway that they’re in over their heads or worse. And it is worse because they also don’t know what science is. They don’t do counterfactuals and consider what extreme events might have been prevented by warming as well as caused by it.
And they’re certainly not comparing known extreme events today with known extreme events in the past.Instead, they take what did happen and sometimes what didn’t, match it against invented scenarios to prove that we caused bad weather. And then they say, “Gotcha.” when the computer Julie says, “Yes, we caused bad weather.” And then they speed dial their lawyer.
That CBC item included the usual guff from the usual suspects, including Naomi Oreskes. It said,
“referring to previous research from her and other experts showing major oil companies knew about the impacts of carbon emissions and the dangers of global warming decades before countries started enacting climate policies.”
Right? Trotsky was a conscious agent of fascism and imperial oil has been trying to incinerate the earth for half a century and now it’s been proved to two decimal places to the satisfaction of people in the media who barely survived grade 10 math. So, while speaking of people not doing science when it is their job, let us also mention people not doing journalism when it is their job.
CTV, for instance, pounced on the supposed study and shrieked, “These Canadian companies among humanity’s biggest carbon emitters study says.” But the study says nothing of the kind. And in fact, nor really does the story, which includes this bit:
“The 14 largest carbon emitters were led by fossil fuel and coal producers from the former Soviet Union and China, followed by oil companies Saudi Aramco, Gasprom, and Exxon Mobile. Together, they made the same contribution to climate change as the remaining 166 entities, according to the study.”
So, Canada’s eight enemies of humanity actually ranked between 70th and 163rd. And together, they supposedly warmed the planet by 0.01°C over nearly two centuries. Which means if they kept at it for another 1750 years, they might warm the place by 0.1° C. And anyone who tells you they can calculate the impact on the weather of such a trivial change is a charlatan and a rogue. And journalists who parrot such claims without any attempt to do basic math, let alone probe how the authors think they know these things, or what other views exist, belong at Pravda, not in free world newspapers.
Now, before concluding, your honor, we wish to say one thing directly to the prisoners currently slumped in the dock or on the lam. The CBC reported that it: “reached out to several carbon majors mentioned in the story, but they either declined to comment or didn’t respond by publication time.” Likewise: “Nature also reached out to the following companies for comment on the study’s findings, but did not receive a response. BP, Shell, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, and Coal India.”
And what indeed could they say? The hydrocarbon energy companies have for too long and with too few exceptions followed a strategy of appeasement, confessing on the science and groveling on the policy, endorsing net zero in the hope of being the last one shot. But since everybody gets shot, it was always a terrible plan. And with the execution fast approaching, it’s time to abandon it.
Of course, if you honestly believe that your product is destroying the Earth, you should say so and get the heck out of that line of work. But if you don’t believe it, stand up for yourselves and not just by saying that the other companies are worse. Because these climate fanatics are not going to stop. They plan to destroy you using pseudoscience to win lawfare. They intend to sue you into oblivion. You, the companies that the rest of us rely on to avoid starving and freezing, and then they’re going to wonder why it got dark all of a sudden. And darkness at noon in the lab definitely has something to do with it.
So, please don’t just stand there. Say something. Plead not guilty because you’re not and they are.
For the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson and that’s our quick response to this Nature study indicting oil companies for setting the planet on fire.
The Los Angeles Times (LAT) recently published an article asserting that “rising heat is causing students to underperform across the globe.” This is false. This is the kind of tidy, single‑cause climate narrative that papers love for two reasons. First, it absolves one of their favorite liberal institutions, the public school system, of responsibility for poor student performance. Second, it points to climate change as a convenient scapegoat for public schools’ failure, no matter how ridiculous that connection sounds to any reasonable person.
The Los Angeles Times (LAT) recently published an article asserting that “rising heat is causing students to underperform across the globe.” This is false. This is the kind of tidy, single‑cause climate narrative that papers love for two reasons. First, it absolves one of their favorite liberal institutions, the public school system, of responsibility for poor student performance. Second, it points to climate change as a convenient scapegoat for public schools’ failure, no matter how ridiculous that connection sounds to any reasonable person. The LAT’s claims don’t square with history, which includes decades of education policy that have steadily watered down standards. It also ignores an easy solution to improve student comfort, air conditioning.
The author of the LAT article, “Rising heat is causing students to underperform across the globe,” claims, “[e]ven on days when temperatures were between 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the data show that students can experience heat stress, followed by a drop in cognitive performance.”
That’s a sweeping generalization ignoring the fact that correlation is not proof of causation.
Basic historical perspective matters. The author of the LAT article ignored the fact that the 1930s were far hotter than at present—yet no nationwide academic collapse followed. See the figure below from the EPA:
Figure. Annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index, from 1895 to 2020 for the contiguous 48 states. The index defines a heat wave as a period lasting at least four days with an average temperature that would only be expected to occur once every 10 years, based on the historical record. Source: Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Change Indicators: Heat Waves,” https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves
As seen in the figure, the United States endured extraordinary heat waves in the 1930s, with many all‑time state heat records set during that decade still standing. Yet there’s no evidence of a contemporaneous, heat‑driven academic nosedive following those years. In fact, during the 1930’s, when there was no air conditioning at all, the number of people unable to read or write in any language, the illiteracy rate, was 4.3 percent in the United States. By comparison, today’s modern public school system has resulted in approximately 21 percent of the adult population being functionally illiterate, meaning they struggle to perform basic reading tasks, lacking the basic reading skills to navigate everyday life.
If heat alone were an academic wrecking ball, the 1930s should have left a stark, indelible crater in student outcomes. They didn’t. For context, see Climate at a Glance: U.S. Heat Waves.
In fact, it’s not clear that hot temperatures necessarily result in declining academic performance. Each year perennially hot India and Southeast Asian countries produce thousands of the world’s top scientists, engineers, statisticians, computer scientists, and mathematicians. Heat evidently hasn’t stunted those nations’ children and teens’ abilities to learn.
Even if heat matters at the margins, air conditioning (AC) neutralizes most of it—and most schools in the United States have (or are adding) AC systems. According to this report,
In the 1950s, the introduction of air conditioning into schools across the United States played a crucial role in transforming the educational landscape. This innovation not only made year-round learning possible but also enhanced student well-being, academic performance, and the overall quality of education.
Hot stuffy rooms may impact learning, but that’s a building‑management problem, not “a climate crisis.” The strongest empirical study on “heat and learning” found that air conditioning largely erases and impact heat might have on test scores. The authors explicitly conclude that learning losses from hotter school days are mitigated by classroom AC.
In practice, American districts have been steadily installing or upgrading AC. Examples range from Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) policy of AC in classrooms to continuing district‑level build‑outs: The website LAist reports LAUSD’s AC policy and challenges keeping aging units running. School districts in historically cooler locations, like in Denver, are also rapidly installing air conditioning in those campuses currently lacking it.
A 2020 GAO report found that 41% of districts needed HVAC updates—telling us many systems exist but are aging and need replacement, not that AC is absent.
If the LAT were serious about student performance related to temperatures a better headline for its article would have been, “Increase Air Conditioning in Schools to Boost Learning.” Instead, we get climate alarm.
The real story of falling performance is three decades or more of “dumbing down” education. The uncomfortable truth is that U.S. schools have been lowering expectations, and inflating grades for years. Simultaneously, the education establishment has been radicalized, substituting controversial social programs and subjects while deemphasizing core disciplines, or worse, suggesting that math and science must be viewed through the lens of race or sex. Physical writing is now almost unknown and reading for pleasure, and the use of imagination it requires, has collapsed—especially among teens—replaced by the instant feed of video games and online media, which require no substantive imaginative thought. These trends pre‑date any recent heat uptick and track far better with long‑run test stagnation and decline.
Here are some points on those issues.
1) Grade inflation is real—and long‑running
ACT’s multi‑state analyses document decades of grade inflation in high schools, not explained away by student or school characteristics. Their review: [Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade] shows sustained growth in GPAs unaccompanied by commensurate gains in external scoring measures.
2) Standards and accountability have been eased—including eliminated exit exams
California suspended and then eliminated its high school exit exam via SB‑172, severing the link between a diploma and minimum academic mastery. That’s not climate; that’s policy.
Alongside this sits decades‑long debate over social promotion (passing students to the next grade absent mastery), documented in research and practitioner statements.
3) Deep reading is disappearing
Federal data show a decades‑long collapse in reading for pleasure, tightly associated with lower comprehension and vocabulary growth. The National Endowment for the Arts summarizes NAEP’s long‑term trend survey findings: from 2012–2023, the share of 13‑year‑olds reading “almost every day” fell sharply; their average reading score also declined over that period.
When students don’t read deeply, they don’t build the background knowledge and vocabulary that drive success in complex texts—no matter the thermostat setting.
4) What the tests actually show over 30 years
The NAEP Long‑Term Trend and main NAEP series—our best consistent yardsticks—report that U.S. reading and math scores have stagnated or drifted down in the 2010s–2020s after earlier gains in the 1990s/2000s.
None of these educational assessments attribute long‑run U.S. underperformance to rising classroom temperatures. They point to curriculum, instruction, standards, engagement, and literacy habits.
Perhaps, not coincidentally, the decline in test scores has also coincided with the introduction and sometimes forced integration of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Critical Race Theory, into schools. Often displacing historically core courses in history, civics, and other disciplines.
The LAT took a complex, decades‑in‑the‑making education problem and tried to pin it on the weather mislabeled as climate change. That’s not journalism, rather it is narrative promotion. The record shows that in 1930s were hotter were hotter than today, and many countries around the world are hotter than the United States, and have been throughout history, yet high quality learning, with higher literacy rates, existed in those times and nations. The evidence also shows that to the extent that temperature does hamper learning, AC largely neutralizes heat‑classroom effects. Also, thirty years of softening standards, grade inflation, social promotion, and the decline of real reading line up far better with the test score arc. So, spare us the climate catechism—instead, try write a headline and a story with intellectual honesty for a change.
In a recent article titled “Climate change making it harder for us to sleep, study says,” ABC News claimed that climate change is now not just responsible for hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding—it’s also robbing us of our sleep. This evidence for this is at best scientifically flimsy and at worst flatly false. Data does not show that heat waves or nighttime temperatures are increasing globally in a way that would significantly disrupt human sleep patterns.
In a recent article titled “Climate change making it harder for us to sleep, study says,” ABC News claimed that climate change is now not just responsible for hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding—it’s also robbing us of our sleep. This evidence for this is at best scientifically flimsy and at worst flatly false. Data does not show that heat waves or nighttime temperatures are increasing globally in a way that would significantly disrupt human sleep patterns.
“If temperature keeps rising the way they project it to, the burden and prevalence of sleep apnea may double, increasing by 20-100%, depending on greenhouse gas emission reduction,” Bastien Lechat, the lead author of the study that ABC News based its story on, told the news service.
First, it’s important to note that a large portion of the measured temperature rise in cities is due to the well-known Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, not long-term climate change. Studies show that local temperatures, particularly nighttime temperatures, are elevated in urban areas because of concrete, asphalt, and heat retention from human activity. This effect can easily be mistaken for broader climate warming if not properly controlled for in studies. As noted by Climate Realism, the UHI effect significantly skews local temperature readings and has not been adequately accounted for in many of the studies used to bolster claims of increasing nighttime heat waves.
The article’s alarm about rising nighttime temperatures is further undermined by the fact that global average temperatures have risen by mere tenths of a degree over the past several decades. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), global nighttime minimum temperatures have increased by only about 0.15°C per decade since 1950. Even if this rate continued, the changes would be too small to create the sort of sweeping health crisis ABC is forecasting.
Most of the year is well below the extreme nighttime temperature pegged by the authors of the Nature study as leading to increasing incidences of sleep apnea. Winter nighttime lows could rise from 30℉ to even 50℉ and not have an impact. During the summer, average nighttime low temperatures across the U.S. and China, for example, even in July, are in the 60s and 70s. So temperatures there would have to rise regularly by more than 10 degrees, to meet or exceed 81.4℉ temperature cited in the study as problematic, but temperatures have only risen less than 2℉ since 1950. ABC missed this fact entirely.
Attributing the rise in sleep apnea to climate change is a medical misdiagnosis. The primary causes of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are well-known and have nothing to do with ambient temperatures. According to the Mayo Clinic, the main risk factors for sleep apnea include obesity, thick neck circumference, narrowed airways, family history, use of alcohol or sedatives, smoking, nasal congestion, and certain medical conditions such as high blood pressure. Nowhere in this list does “climate change” appear. And nowhere in the study does it indicate that it controlled for these known risk factors to tease out any additional suffering from warming.
Additionally, a systematic review in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews confirmed that weight gain and anatomical factors are the dominant contributors to sleep apnea worldwide. It is simply not credible for ABC to suggest that a few tenths of a degree in nighttime temperature could double sleep apnea cases globally.
ABC also misses the mark when it tries to link restless nights to warmer temperatures. According to Harvard Medical School, the most common contributors to insomnia and poor sleep include stress, anxiety, depression, irregular sleep schedules, and lifestyle factors such as caffeine or alcohol use. Temperature can play a role, but as a relatively minor factor when compared to these well-documented causes.
Even studies that explore the relationship between temperature and sleep quality, including the one cited by ABC, acknowledge that the observed changes in sleep duration and quality are often minimal—sometimes amounting to a few minutes per night. These small statistical changes are hardly the public health emergency ABC is suggesting.
Furthermore, the claim that a 40 to 45 percent increase in sleep apnea episodes on hot days is contextually void. This claim, that ABC News pulled from the Nature Communications study, is based on comparing extreme heat days to cooler ones, but this does not establish a causal relationship over time. It also does not account for confounding variables like UHI effects, indoor climate control (air conditioning is common in most of the developed world), and individual health status.
On top of this, the article’s sweeping predictions rely heavily on speculative future warming scenarios, specifically the high-emission RCP8.5 pathway, which is now widely regarded by climate scientists as implausible. Basing health projections on worst-case emissions scenarios that climate science itself has walked back is scientifically suspect if not invalid.
Also, global access to air conditioning is increasing steadily, particularly in regions where warmer nighttime temperatures might otherwise cause discomfort. If temperature impacts sleep apnea, indoor air temperatures are what matters, not outdoor air, and with air conditioning indoor air can be controlled. A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) highlights that the growing adoption of air conditioning will continue to mitigate heat-related health risks, including poor sleep. Ignoring this technological adaptation is yet another oversight in the ABC article.
To summarize: urban heat islands skew local temperature readings, medical literature firmly identifies lifestyle and anatomical factors as the primary causes of sleep apnea, and modern adaptation technologies like air conditioning can mitigate heat impacts. The global warming trend, when properly accounted for, is insufficient to explain any significant increase in sleep apnea cases or widespread sleep deprivation.
In the end, ABC has cobbled together a tenuous connection between climate change and a growing health concern—sleep apnea—while ignoring the substantial medical and social factors that contribute to the problem and technological factors that could mitigate or reduce it regardless of outside temperatures.
ABC News should be embarrassed by this piece that borders on the absurd. Climate change is causing sleep apnea. Really? Next, they’ll tell us climate change is making our toast burn in the morning.
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.
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. CNNreported that “heat waves are getting more dangerous with climate change” and that the current heat wave “bears the hallmarks of human-caused global warming.” NPRconcluded that “human-caused climate change has made this heat wave three times more likely” due to emissions from “burning of coal, oil and gas.” Timestated 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 bookGreen Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
German blog site lokalgeschichte here looks at the German summer of 1911, which was exceptionally hot, dry and sunny. It disproves the previously widespread idea that Central Europe’s heat waves are something new and due to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
1911 in Germany saw a hot, dry summer that lasted from spring until well into September
German blog site lokalgeschichte here looks at the German summer of 1911, which was exceptionally hot, dry and sunny. It disproves the previously widespread idea that Central Europe’s heat waves are something new and due to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Germany saw extreme heat from spring until September in 1911. Symbol image, produced by Grok
Although temperatures in the summer of 1911 were very high in places (up to 40 C in Chemnitz), no new records were broken. The year 1892 had similar or even higher values (41.5C in Reichenhall). The most remarkable feature of the summer of 1911 was not the absolute maximum temperature, but the duration of the hot spell and the persistent tendency towards dry and warm high-pressure weather, which lasted from spring until well into September.
In 1911, Germany saw extreme drought, particularly in western and central Germany. In Berlin, for example, only about half of the normal precipitation fell between April and July, and only a seventh in August. Such an event occurring today would have climates alarmists blaming CO2. But, as 1911 shows, weather extremes are nothing new.
According to the article, the cause of such weather is a persistent shift of high-pressure areas over continental Europe. However, the fundamental forces that control these atmospheric currents are not yet fully understood. Although the outflow of heated air from the tropics to the poles influences the climate of the temperate zones and the conditions in higher atmospheric layers could play a role, there are still no reliable laws for accurate forecasting.
Meteorological observations over almost two centuries show that cool and warm summers occur in bunches. Examples of this are eight consecutive cool summers from 1881 to 1888 and 18 cool summers from 1730 to 1747, as well as 15 warm summers from 1756 to 1770. The climate balances itself out over longer periods of time. It’s naturally occurring.
A number of media outlets are claiming that U.S. heatwaves are getting worse this week due to climate change. This is false. Actual data from temperature measurements show that heatwaves in the U.S. are on the decline even as climate change has occurred over the last 75 years.
A number of media outlets are claiming that U.S. heatwaves are getting worse this week due to climate change. This is false. Actual data from temperature measurements show that heatwaves in the U.S. are on the decline even as climate change has occurred over the last 75 years.
It is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and unsurprisingly to those that pay attention to data, it is hot in many places in the U.S. – in other words, business as usual for summer. But, the media sees climate change in every heatwave event, and seeks to exploit a connection, even though one doesn’t exist. For example, last week it was declared that the world had seen its hottest day ever on July 4, with some outlets claiming the “hottest in 100,000 years.” That of course, was proven laughably false here at Climate Realism on both counts.
Monitoring the planet’s climate this summer can give one the impression that the climate system — which includes the oceans, atmosphere, ice sheets and more — has gone off the rails.
Climate studies have warned about an uptick in simultaneous heat waves occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.”
None of the news outlets running heat wave stories this week examined or cites historical data on heat waves, preferring instead to push scary numbers in the form of heat indexes that combine temperature and humidity, reprint the opinion of “climate scientists,” and reference computer models that suggest climate change is making heat waves worse.
Yet, data exists, for any reporter with a modicum of journalistic curiosity to find. The problem is that the data doesn’t look scary.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains a web page on heatwaves in the U.S. which contains some very interesting data and maps. Despite the claims of climate change creating worse heatwaves, the data the EPA has compiled going back to 1948 says exactly the opposite.
The data is on display in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: This map shows trends in unusually hot temperatures at individual weather stations that have operated consistently since 1948. In this case, the term “unusually hot” refers to a daily maximum temperature that is hotter than the 95th percentile temperature during the 1948–2020 period. Thus, the maximum temperature on a particular day at a particular station would be considered “unusually hot” if it falls within the warmest 5 percent of measurements at that station during the 1948–2020 period. The map shows changes in the total number of days per year that were hotter than the 95th percentile. Red upward-pointing symbols show where these unusually hot days are becoming more common. Blue downward-pointing symbols show where unusually hot days are becoming less common. Data source: NOAA, 2021, EPA
The data come from thousands of weather stations across the United States. National patterns can be determined by dividing the country into a grid and examining the data for one station in each cell of the grid. This method ensures that the results are not biased toward regions that happen to have many stations close together.
[Figure 1] was created by reviewing all daily maximum temperatures from 1948 to 2020 and identifying the 95th percentile temperature (a temperature that one would only expect to exceed in five days out of every 100) at each station. Next, for each year, the total number of days with maximum temperatures higher than the 95th percentile (that is, unusually hot days) was determined. The map shows how the total number of unusually hot days per year at each station has changed over time.
The EPA’s data for 1,066 weather stations across the United States showed a total of 863 stations, or 81 percent, reporting either a decrease or no change in the number of unusually hot days. By comparison, only 19 percent of all weather stations reported an increase in the number of unusually hot days since 1948.
Many of the stations showing hotter temperatures over the 1948-2020 period were located at airports or otherwise badly sited locations that created heat biases such as reported by the study Climate Realism covered last year, Corrupted Climate Stations: The U.S. Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed. As reported in that study, much of the upward heat bias occurs in the minimum overnight temperature at these weather stations, enabling them to reach higher than expected daytime high temperatures had they not had a “head start” from the warmer than expected overnight low.
In fact, you can see this issue on display using maximum and minimum data for all weather stations in the U.S. Figures 2A and 2B below show maximum and minimum temperatures in the U.S. from 1948, so that it matches the start of EPA data in Figure 1.
Figure 2A maximum temperatures in the U.S. since May 1948 to June 2023, 2B minimum temperatures in the U.S. since May 1948 to June 2023. Source: NOAA National Temperature Index plotter. Note: color of the maximum temperature series in 2A has been changed to red from blue to delineate the two sets of data.
In figure 2A, you can see the maximum temperatures (the sort of temperatures that would occur in a heat wave) have not changed much since 1948. In fact, there are spikes of high temperatures in the U.S. in 1954 and in 1963 that are higher than the present day.
In figure 2B, you can see the minimum temperatures have had a slow and steady rise since 1948, with peaks in the last 20 years (warmer nights) being higher than values in the 1940s and 1950s.
Finally, another graph from the EPA shows that heat waves were actually the worst for the U.S. in the 1930s, well before climate change became a blip on the media radar. See Figure 3.
Figure 3. This figure shows the annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index from 1895 to 2021. These data cover the contiguous 48 states. An index value of 0.2 (for example) could mean that 20 percent of the country experienced one heat wave, 10 percent of the country experienced two heat waves, or some other combination of frequency and area resulted in this value. Data source: Kunkel, 2022, EPA https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves
The bottom line is this: despite what the media says, real-world data shows heat waves are NOT getting worse in the United States due to climate change. This flies in the face of opinions by climate scientists cited in the mainstream media which seems wedded to the narrative that climate change is causing a crisis, despite data to the contrary.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.
Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts.
He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.
He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
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