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.
The wildfires in Europe have prompted Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to claim that the “angry Online Right” needs to accept Net Zero. But all his ‘facts’ are wrong, says Paul Homewood.
The wildfires in Europe have prompted Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to claim that the “angry Online Right” needs to accept Net Zero. But all his ‘facts’ are wrong, says Paul Homewood.
The Online Right is going wrong, eschewing compassion or charm, talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance. The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows.
Take climate change. This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.
As with so many of his ilk, Stanley confuses weather with climate. Take the latest fires in France.
Yes, the wildfires are running above average this summer in Europe, but there have been other years as bad and worse. But much more importantly, the data since 1980 show that wildfires around the Mediterranean have not been getting worse:
European wildfire trends
Stanley cannot even get his facts right, claiming that in past times France endured roughly 15 fires each year. The true figure is around 100.
Stanley then claims that Europe is thought to have lost around 10 million tons of forecast grain production last month. Annual output is around 500 million tonnes on average, making that loss just 2%. The historical record shows that annual output regularly rises and falls by much bigger amounts than this.
He then quotes a British farmer:
“Last year it was really dry,” a farmer from Merseyside told the BBC: “2024 was really wet. There’s no clear pattern other than extremes. … We might as well not bother growing things and leave the farms empty.”
It is, of course, called weather!
Last year was a long way from being the driest on record – there have been 26 drier summers in England. Nor was the previous summer particularly wet.
It is a fact that, when it comes to rainfall in England, “extremes” are the norm! But there are no trends towards either wetter or drier summers.
He dismisses the Right’s criticism of Net Zero that the UK cannot make a jot of difference as we only produce 1% of the world’s CO2 by saying we should think about the Third World. According to Stanley:
In reality, if anything, poor countries are more worried about climate change than we are – for the simple, horrible reason that they are more vulnerable to its effects.
Every year, an average of 110,000 people are displaced by natural catastrophe in Bangladesh alone. This is a country where more than half the population works in farming, yet one-third of its agricultural GDP is expected to vanish by 2050.
Bangladesh has always been prone to natural disasters. But this is where his whole argument falls flat on its face.
Far from the picture he paints, Bangladesh’s agricultural sector is thriving. Cereal production, which includes rice, hit new highs in 2023 and 2024 and has doubled since the 1990s. Agricultural GDP has tripled in that time as well.
A half of the country’s population was in extreme poverty in the 1980s, according to the World Bank. That proportion is now just 5%. GDP per capita is four times higher than it was just 30 years ago.
Life expectancy is much higher and child mortality has plummeted. By all measures, the people of Bangladesh are unimaginably better off than they were just a generation ago.
The same, of course, applies to pretty much the whole of the developing world, with the exception of war-torn countries such as Sudan and Somalia.
Bangladesh cereal and rice production trends
None of this would have happened without fossil fuels.
Without fertilisers and mechanisation, all made possible by the fossil fuels he demonises, millions of Bangladeshis would literally starve to death.
Is that what Tim Stanley wants? What right does the West have to dictate to the Third World how its people must live their lives?
He claims that rolling out renewables in the UK will bring lower prices and energy security. I don’t know what planet he is on, but the current push to Net Zero is having the very opposite effect.
Right-wingers have always been pragmatic types. If renewable energy really offered all these benefits, the market would automatically embrace them. They would not need the unaffordable subsidies, carbon taxes and mandates we have now, which are wrecking the economy and leaving us perilously exposed to blackouts.
Renewable energy is fine under the right circumstances. Solar panels in the Gobi Desert, for instance, or hydro power in Norway. But here in the UK, we only really have wind power – and we cannot rely on it when the wind stops blowing for weeks on end in winter.
Until somebody comes up with a better idea, we will still need fossil fuels, whether Tim Stanley likes it or not.
The European Union’s approach is more diffuse but no less consequential. There is no single Brussels air-conditioning law; instead Ecodesign and energy-labelling rules govern which units may be sold, the revised F-Gas Regulation squeezes the refrigerants that make cooling affordable, and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive places air-conditioning into a wider inspection and certification regime.
In Camden, North London, a homeowner did something that would strike most of the people in the world as entirely unremarkable: he fitted two air conditioning units to the rear of his flat so that his family might sleep more comfortably through a spell of hot weather. Camden Council’s planning enforcement officers thought otherwise. They ordered the units “permanently removed”, ruling that the installation breached the borough’s “cooling hierarchy” policy, and advised the resident to rely instead on open windows and balcony doors. This was no isolated bureaucratic misfire. It happened during a stretch of hot, dry weather of the sort Britain has seen periodically for decades, one that produced some locally exceptional readings elsewhere on the Continent but nothing that anyone who sweated through the summers of 1976 or 2003 would call unprecedented.
What was unusual was the accompanying alleged body count. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Met Office announced more than 2,700 estimated deaths across England and Wales attributable to the May and June heat, a figure duly repeated across the press as established fact.
As my colleague Ben Pile points out, it was nothing of the sort. The 2,700 figure was not a count of bodies but the output of a statistical model estimating how many deaths would statistically not have occurred at lower temperatures – a hypothesis presented to the public as an observed fact. Britain’s own official mortality statistics show that cold weather kills roughly four times as many people every year as heat does, a detail rarely mentioned by the same commentators demanding ever more urgent climate action. None of this should surprise readers familiar with the modelling habits of Britain’s climate establishment: last year’s equally confident predictions of a heatwave death spike were followed by mortality data that, if anything, declined through the following weeks.
The narrower point worth making is about consumer choice. The same institutions that tout estimated heat deaths to justify accelerating Net Zero are also among the loudest defenders of the planning regime that blocks the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread: the ordinary air conditioner. One might expect a policy establishment that spends every summer touting heat-mortality estimates to embrace, without hesitation, that remedy. Instead, Britain and the European Union have spent the better part of two decades constructing precisely the opposite – a regulatory architecture engineered to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary households to own, install and run an air conditioner. This is the energy-efficiency mindset carried to its logical, and thoroughly illogical, conclusion.
The cooling hierarchy
London’s planning rules, inherited from the 2021 London Plan under Mayor Sadiq Khan, instruct developers to minimise reliance on “energy-intensive” cooling wherever possible, and boroughs including Camden and Islington have adopted the doctrine into their own local frameworks. Nationally, England’s building regulations require new-build developers to prove that shading, insulation and ventilation have been exhausted before mechanical cooling is even considered. None of these regulations amount to an outright ban – existing homeowners face no legal bar to fitting a window unit – but the cumulative effect has left Britain with barely three in every 100 homes air-conditioned, against roughly nine in 10 in the United States. Claire Coutinho, the former UK Energy Secretary, called the Camden enforcement action absurd and accused planners of trapping Britain in a self-imposed climate of deprivation – a fair complaint, though one wonders how far her own party’s Net Zero commitments differ from it in kind rather than degree.
Brussels’ thermostat
The European Union’s approach is more diffuse but no less consequential. There is no single Brussels air-conditioning law; instead Ecodesign and energy-labelling rules govern which units may be sold, the revised F-Gas Regulation squeezes the refrigerants that make cooling affordable, and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive places air-conditioning into a wider inspection and certification regime. Member states have then layered their own restrictions on top.
During the 2022 energy crisis following the start of the Ukraine war, Spain and Italy imposed legal minimum thermostat settings on public and commercial buildings, and this summer, as the current heat dome settled in, the European Commission issued guidance urging households not to set their units below 25°C, noting that every degree colder adds roughly 7% to electricity consumption – advice from Brussels on how cool a citizen may make his own living room.
Nowhere is the paternalism more explicit than in Switzerland, admittedly outside the EU but instructive all the same. In Geneva, a homeowner seeking a permit for a fixed air-conditioning unit must demonstrate a genuine need for it, and comfort does not qualify; some residents have resorted to producing a doctor’s certificate. Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft go further still, barring residential units outright, while Zurich has in the past refused permission for a care home to run an ageing unit through a heatwave because it fell short of efficiency thresholds. The predictable result, as reporting from the canton shows, is a surge in sales of cheap, inefficient portable units that guzzle more electricity than the fixed systems residents were denied.
The energy-efficiency gap, revisited
The mandatory fuel-economy and appliance standards beloved of the Obama and Biden administrations rest on the presumption of a widespread “energy-efficiency gap”. Careful ex-post studies have repeatedly found that the magnitude of supposedly unexploited, profitable efficiency investments is far smaller than engineering studies claim, and that ordinary households and firms generally know their own circumstances better than a regulator armed with a spreadsheet.
A Mexican Government programme which subsidised the replacement of old refrigerators and air-conditioners on the promise of a 30% energy saving delivered only 7% once the engineers’ ex ante models met actual ex post consumer behaviour. What Europe’s air-conditioning saga adds to this record is a darker variant: rather than merely mandating that appliances be efficient, governments have moved to discourage ownership of the appliance itself, redefining comfort as a vice to be rationed through planning law, cantonal permits and moral suasion.
A recent report from the Consumer Choice Center catalogues the result as a genuine patchwork across all 27 EU states, the UK and Switzerland. Building façade rules, heritage permits, condominium consent thresholds and energy inspections vary so wildly that a consumer moving from Warsaw to Zagreb encounters an entirely different legal universe. The predictable consequence is not less energy use but more disorder: illegal installations have proliferated in the Netherlands because the legitimate route is so onerous, while in Portofino, Italy’s wealthiest town, police mounted a crackdown on illicit units after the mayor spotted one hanging over an alleyway.
None of this looks like careful regulation. It looks like prohibition, with prohibition’s familiar side effects. Red tape, aesthetic objections in conservation areas and the overriding imperative of “climate neutrality” by 2050 have kept effective cooling out of reach for millions. Increasing AC use, we are told, would undermine emissions targets. Better that people suffer than the planet be “harmed” by the very technology that has made hot summers tolerable in America, Japan and much of Asia for decades.
This is the logic of energy efficiency taken to its absurd conclusion.
There is, too, a cultural dimension which no cost-benefit analysis captures. British breakfast television has run segments debating whether using air conditioning is “selfish”. German commentators have coined the term “AC-phobia” to describe a guilt complex around climate that keeps citizens from buying a unit their American or Japanese counterparts would consider unremarkable. In responding to some US journalists and social media influencers criticising and making fun of a sweltering Paris because the city “does not have A/C in every room”, Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar recently issued a statement claiming that the US bears a “significant amount of responsibility” for the ongoing heatwave in Europe.
Washington’s different answer
While London’s boroughs draw up “cooling hierarchies” and Geneva’s cantonal officials weigh medical certificates, Washington has taken the opposite path – under an Energy Secretary who has made consumer choice the organising principle of his department. On July 2nd 2026, Secretary Chris Wright announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking intended to permanently end federal efficiency mandates governing air conditioners, gas stoves, washing and drying machines, water heaters and refrigerators, rather than merely delaying them as earlier deregulatory notices had done.
Mr Wright put it plainly: “In America, you should be able to choose a dryer that dries clothes on the first try rather than one that takes multiple cycles – unfortunately, past administrations thought otherwise.” For too long, he continued, Americans had paid the price for rules that restricted choice and drove up costs. President Trump had promised to end this nonsense, as one X user posted last year: “[i]t only took 29 years, but Jerry Seinfeld’s complaint about government-mandated, low-flow showerheads was finally taken seriously. Trump signed an EO to make showerheads great again.” Showerheads with greater pressure, washing machines and dishwashers that actually do the job, light bulbs that don’t cost an arm and a leg and plastic straws that don’t fall apart mid-drink make people’s lives easier – and it is common sense, as Secretary Wright would put it.
This move sits squarely within the broader deregulatory framework established by President Trump’s Executive Order 14,192 of January 31st 2025, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation.” That order imposed a “10-for-1” requirement: for every new regulation issued, agencies must identify at least 10 existing ones for repeal, with the explicit goal of driving net regulatory costs significantly below zero in the first year. It is a sharper version of the 2-for-1 rule from Trump’s first term.
Chris Wright’s proposal rewrites the Process Rule that has, under successive administrations, required each new generation of household appliance to be more efficient than the last, and would make it far harder for a future administration to reimpose that ratchet. Wright put the matter in terms any consumer could follow, arguing that Americans deserve the freedom to choose a dryer that works properly on the first cycle rather than one engineered chiefly to satisfy a federal emissions target. Indeed, as Gary Abernathy of CFACT complained, it is high time that the US Government “stop treating us like children, coercing us into buying overpriced ‘energy-efficient’ appliances that don’t do the job!”
Consumer and climate change advocates object that the old mandates saved households on their utility bills each year while reducing emissions. Yet one academic study found that much of the policy analysis on energy efficiency “runs counter to the most rudimentary economic theory and our general sense that we do not live in a world in which people never make sound choices”. If energy efficiency were such a great strategy, would ordinary people need experts in the IEA, the World Bank or McKinsey to tell them how to save money? Is the pavement filled with $20 bills that remain uncollected, “low hanging fruit as it were”? One would think it natural that businessmen and heads of households know how to save money and cut costs as they see fit.
Two enlightenments
The contrast is not merely regulatory; it reflects two distinct inheritances from the Enlightenment itself. America’s founding generation drew on Locke’s conviction that legitimate government exists to secure a citizen’s natural rights to life, liberty and property – a principle Jefferson refashioned in the Declaration of Independence’s promise of an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. On that reading, state power is a trust granted by consenting individuals for narrow, limited purposes; it is not a warrant for philosopher-kings (or queens), however well-credentialed, to decide how warm a citizen’s living room ought to be.
Continental and British statecraft drew instead on a more paternalistic strand of Enlightenment rationalism characteristic of ‘democratic socialism’ and Fabianism. The post-war EU and UK political elites believed that an educated administrative class could calculate the public good more reliably than the public itself and was entitled to act on that philanthropic calculation. It is this second tradition that produced London’s cooling hierarchies, Brussels’ thermostat guidance and Geneva’s medical certificates: each an expression of the conviction that comfort is too important to be left to the person who has to live with the decision.
Secretary Wright’s Energy Department is reasoning in the older American idiom – that the pursuit of happiness includes the freedom to choose one’s own dryer and one’s own air conditioner, and that the state’s job is to get out of the way of that choice rather than to supervise it.
Europe does not lack the technology, the electricity supply or the wealth to cool its homes. What it lacks is a governing philosophy willing to concede that comfort, like any other good, is for the person paying for it to decide in a free market. A genuinely liberal response would streamline permitting, treat a condenser unit on a balcony as no more of a planning offence than a satellite dish and abandon the pretence that a household which chooses air conditioning over a hand-held fan has failed some test of environmental virtue. In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher king – the ‘expert’ – ruled, and the plebs obeyed. In our liberal democracies, one would have thought, ordinary people run their businesses or their household budgets as they see fit, and energy efficiency is their own business.
There, in the end, is the contrast that matters. London’s borough councils, Brussels’ directorates and Switzerland’s cantons still see no place in their air-conditioning rules for consumer sovereignty; the citizen remains someone to be managed, permitted and, where necessary, ordered to remove what he has already installed.
Consistent with Trump’s counter-revolution in US energy policy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been moving in the opposite direction to his European and British counterparts – dismantling the mandates of his predecessors precisely in order to hand the decision back to the household that pays the bill. One tradition traces its authority to a Lockean compact that treats the citizen’s pursuit of happiness as the point of government; the other traces its authority to an expert class that decides on behalf of its hapless citizens.
Accordingly, then, the bodies were found by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Imperial College London and the Met Office, who claimed to have found more than 2,700 corpses, each with the signature of anthropogenic climate change on them.
It has been quite warm. And on some people’s views, this is a sign of things to come – slightly warmer weather means that Britain is going to be torn from her foundations by the elements that made her. Yet the heatwave, which, after all, as far as most people are concerned, is merely holiday weather, makes for a poor harbinger for that reason. It’s like calling a windfall of cash a sign of looming poverty. So the Green Blob requires a ritual, and therefore that the bodies be found and paraded in front of the press such that fingers can be pointed and Gaia’s wrath invoked against those who dare utter otherwise. Nobody should be allowed to remember the warm days of June and July 2026 fondly.
Accordingly, then, the bodies were found by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Imperial College London and the Met Office, who claimed to have found more than 2,700 corpses, each with the signature of anthropogenic climate change on them. “Using historical mortality records and established peer-reviewed methods,” which “build on previously published research”, these ‘researchers’ found that “550 heat-related deaths occurred in England and Wales during the May heatwave” and “2,200 during the June heatwave”.
According to the press release:
Dr Clair Barnes, Research Associate in Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Imperial College London, said: “It’s time we woke up to the fact that we now live in a country with dangerously hot summers. To protect people during future extremes, we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach Net Zero emissions to stop this from getting worse.”
And this, my friends, is how we can know for absolute sure that climate change is bullshit, even if it’s real, and even if Britain’s hat-trick of heatwaves in 2026 was caused by it. Because, even if climate change and the heatwaves were real, the deaths were not. As one might expect from the trinity of the LSHTM/Imperial/Met Office, all is not as it seems.
The 2,700 figure is not derived from counting deaths; it comes from statistical attribution models. Researchers combined temperature records with historical relationships between heat and mortality, adjusting for age, geography and long-term trends. The model estimates how many deaths would not have occurred had temperatures remained lower. These are ‘heat-attributable’ deaths rather than directly observed excess deaths.
The Oxford University epidemiologist pair provide us a view of the available data. The May heatwave occurred in weeks 21-22 and the June heatwave in 25-26.
We have been here before. Last year, I reported on how ‘Imperial Predicted Hundreds of Heatwave Deaths – But Deaths Actually Went Down This Summer’. 2025 was also a ‘hot year’, and the news cycle, despite all the real problems the country and world are experiencing, was full of doom-laden climate prognostication from heatwave propaganda. So I had a few discussions with statistician William Briggs about what the data showed. And they showed… practically nothing. “Not only did people not die at greater rates during the horrible heat,” observed Briggs, “they were so bad at science that they declined to die less and less, all through August!”
In fact we’ve been here many times before. Most years bring heatwaves. And these heatwaves bring in their wake bullshit from climate attribution studies along with fake academics peddling stories about thousands of non-existent corpses.
The fake-academic, pseudoscientific enterprise generates endless headlines on its annual cycle. “More than 2,700 people may have died in exceptional May and June heatwaves in England and Wales,” declared the BBC.
All the elements are there for anyone to understand that this phenomenon is propaganda. At the very least, someone with merely the vaguest remnants of self-respect, if not journalistic curiosity, would ask where the 2,700 bodies were and what the actual mode of death was. And despite the lack of an obvious stench from so many corpses, there is the fake academic, remember, urging that “we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach Net Zero emissions to stop this from getting worse”.
Fortunately, the solution to the scourge of thousands of fake deaths is extremely simple: stop lying. We could close down these manifestly harmful fake academic research organisations, which have been colonised by political ideologies, and the fake deaths would stop instantly. Dr Clair Barns is, as one might expect, housed at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, which is the beneficiary of more than £30 million in grants from its namesake founder, the Anglo-American hedge fund billionaire Jeremy. Her profile boasts – though the news reports that quote her do not admit – that she is part of “the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, attributing changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events to climate change”.
Such people are not scientists or statisticians. They are weirdo cultists belonging to a weirdo religious cult, which has somehow manage to colonise Britain’s institutions. From 2,700 imaginary corpses caused by nice weather, these weirdos conjure an argument that requires the dismantling of democratic control of politics and the radical reorganisation of the global economy.
Over in the Guardian, Fiona Harvey weeps, however, that news media coverage of the heatwaves wasn’t alarmist enough, and that some journalists and outlets had failed to properly bow and scrape to the green movement. “Analysis of nearly 2,500 articles finds almost three-quarters made no reference to global heating,” claims the paper’s boringly repetitive “Environment Editor”. The “analysis” was that of the Green Blob-funded and misnamed Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), which, like some kind of Stalinist secret police department, checks each publication’s output for ideological conformity.
It should be noted that Grantham is a European Climate Foundation (ECF) grantor, and that the Guardian, WWA and ECIU are all ECF grantees. In other words, a Green Blob-funded ‘journalist’ in a Green Blob-funded fake newspaper uncritically reproduces a Green Blob-funded front organisation’s claims that real news organisations aren’t sufficiently linking nice weather to ‘climate change’ by ignoring claims about fake deaths detected by Green Blob-funded fake scientists. It is money that keeps the bullshit flowing. It doesn’t matter how many times it is debunked, the bullshitters have vastly more cash and resources available to them than the debunkers.
In his blog post “Pas de climatisation, s’il vous plaît ! Nous sommes Français!“ (Please, no air conditioning! We are French!), Nicolas Lecaussin discusses an ironic editorial from The Wall Street Journal that mocks the French government’s reluctance to embrace air conditioning.
He notes that French authorities seem to prefer seeing citizens suffer through heatwaves approaching 40°C rather than utilizing modern air conditioning. Lecaussin highlights guidelines from ADEME (the French Agency for Ecological Transition) that discourage general AC use. The agency states AC should only be used as a last resort for vulnerable people (like the elderly or pregnant women), and even then, only in a single room with the temperature set no lower than 26°C (approx. 79°F), due to high energy consumption and climate impact.
Lecaussin ridicules official government and healthcare service advice on staying cool without AC. These tips include wetting one’s face and arms, eating cold soup, covering windows with homemade cardboard protectors, and turning off computers and hair dryers to limit indoor heat. Lacaussin argues this forces citizens to live abnormally rather than taking real steps against the heat.
The Climast et Verité post points out that even though public health agencies acknowledge a major surge in heat-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations, many French buildings (which it calls “thermal kettles”) and even hospitals themselves remain without air conditioning.
France’s climate is known for its warm and sunny summers – especially southern France – and has always experienced heat waves. Yet, despite its aging population, the country refuses to install air conditioners. Instead, it allows thousands of elderly to die prematurely and blames the heat waves on fossil-fuel-generated prosperity.
Lecaussin concludes that prioritizing “ecological virtue” over practical cooling has turned into a public health hazard, asserting that France has nothing to be proud of regarding this stance.
If a prize were ever awarded for obstinate stupidity, some French officials would certainly win it.
Last year, I delved into the origins of “heat dome” hysteria. This year, the press has literally doubled down on this scare with news of a “double heat dome” hysteria.
Two heat domes are preparing to join forces, sending temperatures soaring around the U.S. next week.
The first heat dome is developing in the southwest while the second is forming over the subtropical Atlantic, said Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist at Nexstar’s WFLA.
They’ll be replaced by one larger heat dome set to park itself over the center of the U.S. by the Fourth of July holiday.
“This could be the first widespread, significant heat wave of 2026 for much of the South and Midwest,” said Nexstar meteorologist Blake Matthews. “Unlike the record-breaking heat that scorched the desert southwest earlier this year, this event is targeting areas that haven’t experienced prolonged extreme temperatures yet this season.”
Double heat dome coming to US: Here’s when it’ll start, where it’ll be worsthttps://t.co/Ia9P6D9AGM
Instead of offering calm, practical guidance on seasonal weather and local preparedness, headline writers are racing to outdo one another with apocalyptic graphics and overheated climate rhetoric.
So as the nation gets ready for July 4th, we’re being told to fear the forecast rather than focus on the very real, yet very manageable, risks that come with a hot holiday weekend.
— Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki (@MatthewWielicki) July 1, 2026
A heat dome is simply a large, persistent upper‑level high‑pressure system that acts like a lid, trapping hot air near the surface and allowing temperatures and humidity to build for days or weeks. In this case, one dome is developing over the Southwest U.S., and another over the subtropical Atlantic.
Forecasters expect these two ridges to link up and effectively behave as a single, expansive dome over the central and eastern U.S. heading into the Fourth of July period.
NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center said hot weather will be the story this coming weekend from the Plains to the Ohio Valley, with widespread above-average temperatures expected thanks to a strong upper-level ridge of high pressure (aka heat dome) developing.
Highs in the 90s are expected as far north as the Great Lakes and Minnesota, and 100s for much of Texas. Heat indices approaching 110 degrees are possible from the mid-South to the central Gulf Coast where the combination of heat and high dew points will be greatest.
I grew up in the Great Lakes region. Highs in the 90s were not unheard of, and I suspect the 100s are not rare in Texas, either.
The “double” wording is more descriptive/media‑driven than a formal technical term; operational meteorologists are still describing the pattern as a strong, connected ridge/heat dome.
Despite the barrels of red ink and the adjectives, people seem to be chill with the idea that summer days can run a bit hot.
A “heat dome?” 🤣 You mean high pressure bringing warm temps for a few days. Color me shocked in the middle of summer 🤣
The real message is that the next few weeks will be hot. So, make a point of drinking water regularly, wearing lightweight clothing, and taking occasional breaks in the shade or air‑conditioned spaces to avoid overheating.
So as the media pushes “double heat dome” alarmism and slathers maps in apocalyptic reds, most Americans will simply recognize what they’ve always called this season: summer.
My forecast calls for sensible precautions and a healthy dose of skepticism toward overheated rhetoric.
Solar panels are overheating amid soaring temperatures, leading to gas power stations across the UK being ordered to fire up production to make up the shortfall.
Grid operator ‘begged’ Brussels to lift import limits after solar panels struggle in soaring heat
Solar panels are overheating amid soaring temperatures, leading to gas power stations across the UK being ordered to fire up production to make up the shortfall. The Telegraphhas the story.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) issued a rare summer power supply warning overnight as the country braces for temperatures near 40°C on Wednesday and Thursday.
Gas plants have been urged to ramp up output to deal with high levels of demand expected on Wednesday night as homes and offices turn up the air conditioning to endure the heatwave.
The notice comes as soaring temperatures make Britain’s solar farms less efficient, putting further strain on the power grid. Solar panel efficiency typically drops by 0.3% to 0.5% for every degree that a panel’s temperature rises above 25°C.
Noemie Baud, from energy consultancy Montel, said: “Higher demand for air conditioning and cooling systems is contributing to the increase [in power demand], while lower outputs from solar and gas generation means more conventional generation is required to meet demand, pushing up prices.”
Data from the UK’s grid network showed gas generation jumped from around eight gigawatts at 12pm on Tuesday, to more than 17 gigawatts overnight.
More than half of Britain’s power needs were being supplied by gas on Wednesday morning, with wind generating around 12% and solar less than 10%.
“Our forecasts are showing tight margins on the electricity system for tomorrow evening,” Neso said on Tuesday night. “This is due to the impact of extremely high temperatures affecting Great Britain and the Continent and low wind.”
Britain was facing a 1.9 gigawatt shortfall in its “margin” for Wednesday night – the buffer between available power generation and total consumer demand – according to an alert at 9pm on Tuesday from Elexon, the company that manages the electricity trades that keep Britain’s lights on.
The alert signals to Britain’s gas power plants and other suppliers to start generating more energy to meet the expected demand and is not a sign that blackouts are imminent.
An ominous Heat Dome has settled over Western Europe.
It is literally 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) as I type this, and if you were an alien from Pluto listening to central German radio you’d have to conclude that these temperatures are at the very limits of human survivability.
An ominous Heat Dome has settled over Western Europe.
It is literally 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) as I type this, and if you were an alien from Pluto listening to central German radio you’d have to conclude that these temperatures are at the very limits of human survivability. (It’s substantially warmer further west, but the hysteria is the same everywhere.) Meteorologists are running short of death doom colours to depict the dire state of our temperature emergency:
And former Covid Minister Karl Lauterbach has declared that “many people will die” and denounced “Right-wing conspiracy theorists” for not taking sunny summer weather seriously enough.
Meanwhile, in what has become a fixed seasonal ritual, German public health authorities and state media have begun circulating lunatic emergency advice for how to stay cool in this life-threatening heat situation.
Their pointTheir pointers:
Open windows only at night, early in the morning, and late in the evening.
Otherwise close all windows and draw all curtains so you can be both uncomfortably warm and profoundly depressed.
Safely ensconced in your stuffy dark apartment, unplug all electrical devices, including your internet router, because these can emit heat even in “standby mode”.
Also roll up all of your carpets to stop them from storing heat.
Hang up wet laundry in your dark apartment to cool the air via evaporation, but do not hang up too much wet laundry or the air will become excessively humid, which is even worse.
The one electronic device you might possibly consider plugging in, is a fan, to cool your skin. To enhance the cooling effect, put a bucket of all the ice that you have emptied from your unplugged freezer in front of the fan.
What you should not plug in, is any kind of portable air conditioning unit, because the Federal Environmental Agency believes that they will actually make your room warmer when the exhaust air finds its way back into your apartment.ers:
Open windows only at night, early in the morning, and late in the evening.
Otherwise close all windows and draw all curtains so you can be both uncomfortably warm and profoundly depressed.
Safely ensconced in your stuffy dark apartment, unplug all electrical devices, including your internet router, because these can emit heat even in “standby mode”.
Also roll up all of your carpets to stop them from storing heat.
Hang up wet laundry in your dark apartment to cool the air via evaporation, but do not hang up too much wet laundry or the air will become excessively humid, which is even worse.
What you should not plug in, is any kind of portable air conditioning unit, because the Federal Environmental Agency believes that they will actually make your room warmer when the exhaust air finds its way back into your apartment.
This is the modern German Government in a nutshell: ‘The heat is going to kill you, stay inside with the windows closed and the curtains drawn and do all this other weird, crazy and unheard-of stuff to escape the murderous heat, but whatever you do, don’t do the one thing that will actually substantially reduce interior temperatures, because reasons.’
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Kew Gardens is rapidly becoming the new Heathrow as the favoured Met Office site for producing unnatural heat spikes in place of true, uncorrupted ambient air temperatures. This is, of course, useful for suggesting climate collapse and catastrophe to back the Net Zero fantasy, but it is hardly meteorological science at its finest. Kew played a central role in the curated alarums that greeted the recent first heatwave of the British summer.
Kew Gardens is rapidly becoming the new Heathrow as the favoured Met Office site for producing unnatural heat spikes in place of true, uncorrupted ambient air temperatures. This is, of course, useful for suggesting climate collapse and catastrophe to back the Net Zero fantasy, but it is hardly meteorological science at its finest. Kew played a central role in the curated alarums that greeted the recent first heatwave of the British summer. Notable by its absence in the mainstream was the relevant information that Kew has shocking form in producing sudden spikes into record territory, displaying a recording pattern that would be highly unlikely to occur at a site that measured natural air properly.
The reaction across mainstream and social media was often hysterical. This effort from social commentator Matthew Todd was typical of countless bedwetting posts on X.
You’ve got to be off the scale batshit crazy to demand scrapping Net Zero during a record breaking unprecedented spring heatwave— Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 (@MrMatthewTodd) May 27, 2026
Last year, the Met Office claimed an all-time UK high May 1st temperature at Kew of 29.3°C. Analysis by citizen scientist Dr Eric Huxter showed the temperature was almost 2°C above that recorded in the hour before – well above what might be expected from such temperature rises seen during the day, with movements commonly around the plus or minus 0.2°C to 0.4°C mark.
The first record claimed last week was on Tuesday May 25th, when the temperature at the Kew site rose to 34.8°C – some 1.3°C above the previous hour. Dr Huxter has told the Daily Sceptic that some doubt remains over the figures for the next day, when the temperature hit 35.1°C. Since April last year, Huxter observes that Kew has provided no fewer than 13 daily UK extremes with an average heat spike of 1°C. By comparison, in the same period Heathrow supplied 35 temperature spikes averaging 1.2°C.
The main culprit in producing these heat spikes is the switch from liquid-in-bulb thermometers to PRT automatic electronic measuring devices during the last 30 years. These provide a more accurate reading every minute, but it is plain that they are picking up every passing heat spike – often unnatural – that were missed by slower-moving liquid in a glass bulb. Dr Huxter has calculated that in the glass-bulb era up to 1989, the 40 new records (0.3 a year) averaged steps from the previous high of 0.5°C, while from 1990 there have been 147 new records (four per year) with average steps of 1.5°C. This sudden change is used by alarmists – many of them employed by the Met Office – to suggest dramatic climate change. But an obvious and plausible explanation is provided by the switch to more accurate measuring devices.
One-minute heat spikes at the 24-hour maximum are used to calculate daily average temperatures, which eventually find their way into national and international databases. Taking an average of temperatures over five minutes or longer would help reduce the unnatural distortions, but the Met Office seems unwilling to make such an adjustment. By such measurements have flawed decisions on Net Zero been made around the world, costing untold sums of money and contributing to the ongoing destruction of the industrial base of many countries, including the UK.
The heat spikes at urban heat-ravaged Met Office sites are doing much of the heavy lifting in stoking the climate fear that is vital to promoting the political Net Zero cause. Nevertheless, are we sure that such spikes are largely unnatural? Can they occur, for instance, at an open-field site far from artificial influences, where there can be no doubt that the only substance being measured is uncontaminated natural air? Over the last year, Dr Huxter has provided dramatic proof that they cannot – at least not on the regular scale seen at the sites that enter the record books. In that period, he analysed 525,541 minute-by-minute recordings at the Class I site in open farmland at Rothamsted.
The graph above shows clearly that at a pristine site, the vast majority of the half a million readings vary from the previous hour within individual differences in a range between -0.15°C and 0.25°C. Most individual changes were to be found between -0.35°C and 0.45°C. As part of his year-long project, Huxter examined 340 daily maximum temperature highs recorded across 96 Met Office stations and discovered that these sites showed average short heat spikes of around 1.1°C – similar, of course, to the performance of both the Kew and Heathrow stations.
Comparing the Rothamsted control with the 360 heat spikes, a chi-square test showed a highly significant difference of p<0.0,001. This means that if there were truly no difference between the sites, the chances of observing such a large discrepancy in heat spikes would be less than one in 10,000 – in other words, more unlikely than one in 10,000 and quite possibly far smaller: one in 100,000, for example.
It is easy to understand why Kew is now giving Heathrow airport some competition in the heat spikes and ‘record’ temperatures stakes. Dr Huxter’s illustration below has been doing the rounds on social media. There are no jet aircraft on the move, but there are plenty of nearby sources of heat available to bump up the temperatures. Of interest is the plethora of large glasshouses that automatically vent hot air when temperatures climb above 28°C. Every little helps, the cynical might note, when new records are being chased.
It was always a mystery why Kew was a CIMO Class 2 site with no recording ‘uncertainties’. This designation now appears to have been withdrawn, and it is presumably in the junk classes of 3, 4 and 5 – where possible recording errors up to 1°C, 2°C and 5°C respectively are officially noted – that it now resides.
Paul Homewood has suggested that the early June heatwave of 1947 was every bit as intense as last week’s blast. Temperatures of 94°F were recorded on June 3rd at Waddington and in London at Camden Square and Kensington. Notes Homewood: “In contrast, 95°F at Kew probably includes three degrees of UHI [Urban Heat Island]… the evidence from June 1947 does more than undermine Met Office claims that this week’s heatwave is evidence of climate change. It raises the question why they are not giving the public all of the relevant facts by telling them we have had similar weather in the past.”
The last word must go to Dr Huxter: “The observed changes in temperature over the past 30 years therefore owe more to flaws in measurement… rather than any wider anthropogenic effect. The uncritical adoption of the PRT technology, which conveniently reinforced what the modellers believed, now drives the Net Zero Cult.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) states that the global surface temperature has risen markedly since the pre-industrial era. This warming has led to more frequent and intense extreme heat events over most continents. In summer 2010, western Russia was hit by a record-breaking heatwave, with the region experiencing the warmest summer since at least 1880 and numerous cities recording all-time high temperatures.
Via Eurekalert: Scientists quantitatively identify main causes of Russian once-in-a-century heatwave
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) states that the global surface temperature has risen markedly since the pre-industrial era. This warming has led to more frequent and intense extreme heat events over most continents. In summer 2010, western Russia was hit by a record-breaking heatwave, with the region experiencing the warmest summer since at least 1880 and numerous cities recording all-time high temperatures. Furthermore, in the context of global warming, future midlatitude heatwaves analogous to the 2010 event will become even more extreme, with the heatwave intensity increasing by about 8.4°C in western Russia. Thus, unraveling the physical processes involved in the 2010 western Russian heatwave is a matter of considerable concern within the scientific community.
Previous studies have elucidated that this extraordinary event in 2010 mainly resulted from internal natural variability, which includes but is not limited to the processes associated with El Niño to La Niña transition, the intensified Arctic dipole mode, the enhanced moisture–temperature coupling strength, high-latitude land warming, and increased aerosol concentrations. However, there is still some debate regarding the respective roles of dynamical and radiative processes in driving the 2010 western Russian heatwave.
A new study published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters by a research team led by Professor Song Yang at Sun Yat-sen University, China, reveals that surface dynamics and aerosol processes were the key drivers behind the extraordinary 2010 heatwave. This study provides a new quantitative perspective on the record-breaking western Russian heatwave.
“To date, attribution studies have relied primarily on sensitivity experiments conducted with climate models, which often lead to large uncertainties in quantitative results due to considerable model biases. The coupled atmosphere–surface climate feedback response analysis method with the effects of aerosols incorporated (CFRAM-A) is an efficient, model-free approach for quantitative attributions of extreme temperature events. We applied this method to break down the surface warming in western Russia in 2010 into contributions from individual radiative and dynamical processes,” says the first author, Dr. Lianlian Xu.
“Understanding the physical and dynamical origin of regional climate extremes remains a major challenge in our effort to anticipate the occurrences and mitigate the adverse impacts of these extremes,” adds the corresponding author, Prof. Song Yang.
According to this study, the surface warming over western Russia in 2010 can be primarily attributed to the effects of surface dynamics (95%), followed by atmospheric dynamics (49%), clouds (19%), and water vapor (6%), which are partially counterbalanced by aerosol-induced cooling (−64%). Further analysis revealed that the total aerosol cooling was predominantly governed by organic carbon (78%), black carbon (36%), and sulfate (−21%).
This research offers a new perspective for understanding the mechanisms of heatwaves globally and is crucial for improving the predictive capability of such extreme events. The framework presented in this paper not only advances understanding of extreme weather event mechanisms but also underscores the complex interplay between dynamical and radiative factors in driving record-breaking heatwaves.
The industry is already familiar with “dunkelflautes” – the increasingly common spells of freezing windless winter weather when wind and solar farm output plummets. Now it is reporting a similar “hitzeflaute” phenomenon in summer, with longer spells of warm windless weather also becoming more prevalent with climate change.
Hitzeflaute comes from hitze – the German word for heat – and flaute, which means lull, reflecting the absence of strong winds in such spells.
It means Europe and the UK are becoming increasingly dependent on solar power during the day but, in the absence of wind, having to ramp up gas, coal and nuclear power stations in the evening.
The phenomenon also causes massive market swings with power prices often going negative in daytime when solar is peaking, but surging up to £200 or £300 per megawatt hour when the sun goes down, especially if wind output is low.
The UK faces just such a spell this weekend, with a high pressure weather system bringing clear skies, sunshine and low winds that will coincide with the Wimbledon tennis finals.
Of course, it’s all the fault of climate change, not the ludicrous obsession with wind farms that don’t generate enough half the time and generate too much the rest!
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