The strange glee over the European heatwave
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
From the Spectator:
You could almost sense climate campaigners willing those thermometers in Sardinia to nudge into the unknown – a reading above 48.8°C would have marked a new European record and unleashed yet more forewarnings of climatic Armageddon.
But alas, they don’t appear to have got their way – at least not today. As of 6.30 p.m. the highest reported temperatures measured today were in the region of 45ºC, on Sardinia. There was a consolation prize in that the World Meteorological Organisation did finally verify the reading of 48.8ºC in Sicily made on 10 August 2021. Prior to that, the European record was established way back in 1977, which was beginning to look a little inconvenient for the narrative of an Earth which is ‘on fire’.
The all-time global record for temperature, however, remains that measured at Furnace Creek, Death Valley, California on 10 July 1913 (although, hardly surprisingly, there are campaigners lobbying the WMO to have this kicked out of the record books on the grounds that it might have been measured during a sandstorm, whyever that should make it invalid).
Nevertheless, there are many signs that the heat is getting to some people’s heads – those who report on climate for various news organisations. Here are a few of the symptoms that they are beginning to lose a sense of objectivity.
The weather maps that used to show where it is hot don’t always use intense red to denote temperatures above 40ºC (that shade is so 2022). They have started using an intense, scary pink – or even white – instead. White heat, by the way (when all kinds of materials start to glow white) starts around 1800ºC, approximately 1755ºC higher than the temperature in Sardinia today.
Sky News’ Kirsty McCabe told viewers who were hoping to fly off to the Med for a holiday this week: ‘You won’t be able to have the traditional beach holiday, you want to be staying inside’. Actually, while inland temperatures reached up to 45ºC in a few areas, temperatures at the coast, as usual, were more moderate.Only in a small patch of Northern Majorca did they reach 40ºC.
The BBC has suggested Britain’s cool July might have something to do with global warming
The BBC has suggested Britain’s cool July might have something to do with global warming. This time last year we were in the grip of a Mediterranean-style heatwave, blamed on climate change. But this year’s below-average temperatures are also, apparently, a symptom of the same thing. In an online explainer entitled Where has the UK summer gone? the Bee asserts that our chilly weather is all down to a blocking pattern in the air circulation over the North Atlantic, and that ‘some studies suggest climate change might make blocked patterns more common’. Note the word ‘might’.
So, there. Whether it is hot, cold or somewhere in between, it is all a sign of rapidly-accelerating climate change. Curious.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-strange-glee-over-the-european-heatwave/
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
‘You could almost sense climate campaigners willing those thermometers in Sardinia to nudge into the unknown”
Campaigners for climate change. Not against climate change.
The record for Seville is 50 degrees set in 1849
The Europe wide record was 48C set in Athens in 1977, but the WMO recently approved 48.8C in Sicily in 2021.
Your Seville ‘record’ takes us into the murky world of the WMO erasing/ignoring old records as not credible. There’s lots of records higher than the official record!
“…50 C…”
Gosh! Forty-five years ago, I visited Seville in April for the horse festival. Even in the Spring, it was over 40 C every day. It is simply a hot place. Spaniards (then, at any rate) are not like the British. They never waste their time talking about the weather. They know nobody is going to do anything about it* (as Mark Twain said). Of course, sensible people never go out to dine before 9 p.m.
I am reminded by one of my sons that Ray Mears did an experiment on TV about survival, in which a man sat for a considerable time in shorts and T-shirt in a dry sauna at 55 C and simply drank water. He was absolutely fine. It is movement in confining clothes that is dangerous. You can easily get heatstroke
yomping with a heavy pack in the Arctic in winter if your thermal kit is NATO standard.
* Unfortunately, our rulers ARE trying to do something about it.
I have some bad news to report – having scanned next week’s TV mag I see that there is a 2 part BBC propaganda programme on battery cars presented by the runt Rowlatt. Will it be honest? Honesty? At the BBC? Ask Huw about that.
runt Rowlatt
Is he the BBCs alternative for ITVs Roland Rat ??
Have a care you’re talking about the BBC’s Ethical Man (failed)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/justin_rowlatt
Didn’t the same thing happen in 1976, but slightly skewed so we got hit? What about 1911 and the thirties. Strange how previous hot spells that were longer, hotter and real killers, aren’t mentioned!
As Paul has often shown us via the work of HH Lamb, the pattern of the jet stream varies during periods of low solar activity and the meridional pattern brings more rapid changes of weather and more stalled systems. But there is no certain explanation from the ‘settled scientists’ as to why this happens.
That’s ‘cos they don’t know.
Remember, even the IPCC said that climate is chaotic and unpredictable and even today the Met Office appears to do what such organisations are supposedly there to do, explain why we are having this slightly out of the usual weather.
And in a year or two we will be able to say definitively (or perhaps not) whether this has any connection with our pal El Niño.
Meanwhile live with it!
“…slightly unusual weather…”
Since when is a disappointing July unusual in Britain? There is in any case a rather obvious sixty-year cycle in the loopiness of the jet-stream. This sixty years turns up in a lot of climate related phenomena. Of course these are not proven cycles but I am not one to say the science is “settled.” That would be silly, n’est pas?
In recent years we seem to have lost all grasp of historic climate and context.
The alarmist ‘hottest global temperatures ever’ are in reality an incredible mish mash of figures gathered from the surface, balloons, satellites and computer algorithms. There is no more a meaningful global average temperature than there is a global average telephone number. This piece of unscientific nonsense in any case only dates back to 1979 when “I don’t like Mondays” by Bob Geldof and the Boomtown rats graced the top of the charts. Those old enough to remember that, will recall that the previous 3 cool decades were thought by many leading scientists and the media to be the start of a new Ice age.
The ‘hottest June ever’ this year, is only the hottest June ever if you are selective with the dataset used. According to an older data set –Central England temperature- it ranked 5th behind 1846, 1826, 1822 and 1676 No doubt if instrumental records had existed these warm Junes would have been exceeded numerous times back to the Roman empire which is a good place to examine the evidence for the current heatwaves besetting Southern Europe with claims as you might expect of “the hottest temperatures ever”.
In ancient Rome, the Dog Days of summer –that covers this exact period of the year- were believed to be a time of drought, bad luck, and unrest, when dogs and men would be driven mad by the extreme heat. We know the Roman army sometimes had to march at night due to extreme heat, that Rome’s elite worked only until noon then retreated to their cold water Frigidarium often topped up with ice brought from the mountains and stored in straw filled pits, and pumped cold water through their under floor heating systems and then decamped in high summer to their villas by the sea, retreating inside well shaded gardens and houses with thick walls. Nero decreed that after the great fire that Rome should be rebuilt with tall narrow houses that would provide shade to their neighbours.
in short, those who believe climate is a constant and we are stepping outside of some sort of norm due to human activities are ignoring the lessons of history.. Extreme storminess? Roman fleets utterly wrecked by storms including the one intended to attack Carthage-their bread basket- and destroy the Vandals who had seized it when displaced in the North by the Huns fleeing extreme drought. Enemy armies that walked across frozen rivers to attack the Empire, floods that swept away bridges and towns. Hannibal attacked Rome taking a route over the alps largely glacier free during the Roman climate optimum. The glaciers reappeared during the Little Ice age which finished 2 centuries ago and whose subsequent melting as warmer times returned proceeds to this day, helping to raise sea levels by the fractional amounts we currently observe.
Undoubtedly man has an impact on the globe but not primarily through emissions of CO2-at 4% of the total they are dwarfed by those from nature- but by the sheer numbers of us now living in unsuitable locations subject to drought or floods or forest fires, causing deforestation for fuel or to grow crops. Bob Geldof with his 1985 charity event to help Ethiopia would have visited a country of 40 million people, today there is a staggering 127 million. George Harrison started these charity events in Bangladesh following a devastating cyclone there in 1970. The country had 67 million inhabitants at the time, now 173 million. incidentally there was a global population of 170 million in Roman times. Now 8 Billion.
Modern Wide scale urbanisation -roads, buildings, car parks, airports (where most temperatures are-bizarrely-recorded, including the 2022 UK record) absorbs then emits heat like a storage radiator creating the well known ‘urban heat island effect’, but like so much else we seem to have forgotten the huge impact on temperatures urbanisation has in enhancing the natural temperatures . Until we get to grips with population increase and the negative impacts of urban dwelling through the use of more greenery, better built homes etc, then uncomfortable temperatures enhanced by our built environment will be experienced by more of us
The alarmist ‘hottest global temperatures ever’ is a “see, we told you it was getting hotter.”
The problem is, as you say, it’s “an incredible mish mash of figures.” Data points here and there. Records mean double-ought nothing. They are useless outliers.
It’s not til they get to MILLIONS of readings, several percent of all readings, that, “see, we told you it was getting hotter” is significant.
A THOUSAND records mean nothing. They are isolated data points.
Presumably, actual scientists would know that.
I submit that a scientist standing up and crowing about a record somewhere has just tossed his credentials in the bin. As the entire Climate Change movement is obsessed with records, I say it is not a scientific endeavor.
Crowing about records shouts, “We are not scientists!”
I read your post with great interest. It was insightful, and I concur. I would only add, the current climate hoax is a narrative, a goal, a releigion if you will; it has nothing to do with science. As with all crime solving endeavors–follow the money. In this case it goes straight back to China.
It’s not the money, Mr Dick.
It’s freedom. The Marxists abhor freedom. They’ll do anything to stop it. They would literally rather you be dead than free, and, if they had the power, they would implement that solution. Klaus Schwab has said so.
The US and Britain are the main barriers to global, totalitarian government. Climate change is the Universal Cause to get us to accept it. It’s not about money. It’s not about the weather.
The communist goal is not to spread wealth; it is to eliminate it. Wealth creates freedom.
You are correct; the climate hoax is a Marxist ploy to destroy the West from within. The Western “democracy’s” are using it, much like the coof plannedemic, to take our freedoms. My point was there are a lot of people making a lot of money off this hoax; Al Gore, John Kerry, various MEPs and U.S. Congressmen, et al, but most of this green tech is sourced from China. The climate hoax is yet another part of the CCP’s Unrestricted Warfare Program to destroy the economies of the West by chasing the chimera of renewable green energy. This is a complex issue, and I apologize for being flippant.
Paul
Have you seen this? Looks like these high temperatures are fraudulent
https://notrickszone.com/2023/07/19/europes-48c-horror-that-never-was-esa-media-sharply-criticized-for-manipulative-reporting/
Oh Paul, come come. Are you saying weather presenters have went all,
“Hot Headed 🤯”, groan, groan, I know I know. Kamerad Kamerad 👐.
I was just at spoons for breakfast with my geriatric friends, and I took the chart showing the position of the jet stream today, and went through the low solar output causing the wind patterns to be distorted giving a “wiggly” jet stream, nothing to do with global warming or increased CO2.
So why are all these so called experts, unknown professors (and my favourite Fredricke Otto) and the Met office blaming increased CO2. They cannot be experts surely, just liars.
Science -bah
DT 18-07-23 Hugh Tredegar2 HRS AGO
You’ve probably heard that 97 per cent of scientists are agreed that humans are the cause of climate change. It comes from research carried out in 2013.
Do you know how that team obtained that number?
They gathered nearly 12,000 scientific papers dealing with global climate change. They didn’t read the papers – heavens no, that would have been proper research – instead they looked at just the summary paragraphs on the front covers.
On that basis they grouped them into four piles. 3,896 papers agreed humans were to blame for climate change; 7,930 took no position either way; 78 rejected the idea of it being humanity’s fault and 40 were uncertain altogether.
That initial pass gave a figure of just 32 percent blaming humans for climate change. Obviously, that wasn’t nearly scary enough. So then came the gross and clumsy cheat: the 7,930 papers that took no position on whether humans are to blame were removed from the final analysis.
With them gone, the figure of 32 percent went up to 97 per cent. And the likes of Barack Obama and Al Gore have been quoting it ever since.
If my interpretation is correct, this is the kind of deliberate tampering with evidence that underpins the Net Zero madness that is being pursued by the zealots running our countries, or rather ruining our countries…. Neil Oliver gbnews
johnbillscot
If DT is Daily Telegraph, a search for “Hugh Tredegar” returns ‘nothing found’.
Johnbillscot, the original 97% figure came from a paper by ” Doran Zimmerman ” , [ sp, ? ], which found in a survey that about 75 people agreed that human action might have some effect on climate .
In response to that came the OREGON petition , signed by over 30,000 people who said that human effect was nil .
So the fact that their 97% was actually less than 1% , meant that COOK ET AL produced their 97% from published papers ,[ which I believe was only actually 41 papers agreed with them ] , to try to keep this ridiculous lie going for the media and politicians
Climate change is a hoax, 97% of rational people agree on that. A recent survey found that 97% of convicted murders eat vegetables and stated, “Eating vegy’s breeds murders.” See–I just published two scientific papers. It’s that easy. Seriously, climate scientists, such as they are, are funded by government $$$ only released if the “scientists” involved agree with the narrative. Across The Pond, in the U.S., Biden’s campaign managers wrote a letter saying Trump was a Russian Agent, then got fifty-one former “intelligence” agents–all dependent on the Administration for the continuation of their lavish retirement packages–to sign it. See how easy it is to support a narrative?
This is a none issue for discussion. As Einstein when confronted with a petition signed by 100 “scientists” who disagreed with him said. Why do you need 100 when 1 is enough? Science is not performed by ballot. It matters not what I say or what all the bought once scientists dependent on the climate fraud for their wages say. It is what statistically significant empirical data obtained by a falsifiable methodology says.
If there is no empirical data there is no science.
There exists no statistically significant dataset(s) of any kind which support the claim that CO2 returned to the Carbon Cycle by the actions of man can in any measurable way be shown to be responsible for any or all of the current 190 year old warming, the fourth warming in recent human history.
Western civilization, the birthplace of the enlightenment which freed us from religious dogma with empirical data based fact is destroying it’s self by returning to a politically manipulated belief system where purveyors of factual evidence are denounced and silenced.
Just look at the clown show who “present” climate science. Frankly mentally disturbed Swedish teenagers who in spite of what the bought media claims, is only parroting the loopy thinking of her equally mentally unstable non science educated parents. Then come slimy cowardly politicians, celebrities, actors, arts graduate spoilt trust fund brats, chancers, lickspittles and cutpurses.
Would you go to any of this lot for information regarding the health of your body and take instructions from them how to change your life style and solve health problems? No? So why the hell are we allowing these zeros to dictate to us about the “health” of the planet and to champion wasting our taxes on pointless virtue signalling tilting at windmills while behind closed doors they go on with their wasteful lives?
A more absurd and asinine situation it is not possible to invent and yet here it is in reality!
Rant over!
Well stated. I concur. And I too am tired of that chubby, petulant, pig-tailed, teenage scold droning on about her stolen childhood. I like the reference to Einstein, nice touch.
“Then come slimy cowardly politicians, celebrities, actors, arts graduate spoilt trust fund brats, chancers, lickspittles and cutpurses.
Would you go to any of this lot for information regarding the health of your body and take instructions from them how to change your life style and solve health problems? … No ! ”
Sadly a large % of the population DO ‘look to the stars’ & ‘influencers’ for instructions to change life style and solve health problems.
Link to article about the COOK 97% lies .https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/24/quantifying-the-consensus-on-global-warming-in-the-literature-a-comment/
I see, with a no sense of surprise but huge disappointment that the propaganda Corporation is hard selling Packham as the new Attenborough to front a series presenting geological climate crises.
Attenborough would have been bad enough, he is dramatic enough, but Packham will no doubt be “extreme” even relative to his patron’s histrionics. The show will ne “unprecedented” in hyper marketing the “records” set in each weather epoch.
Oh dear – I was such a fan of the Beeb thirty years ago when they understood “balance” and “truth”.
It takes me only 0.5 seconds to find the TV clicker and turn off the set when Packham appears. This is marginally quicker than it takes to turn off Jeremy Corbyn and Miliband. Mind you it takes at least 5 seconds to do the same when Monbiot appears as most of that time I am frozen in horror.
Thank you for the warning about that program, which will undoubtably be recycled in Australia on the ABC (BBC lite). Unfortunately I won’t be able to switch it off as I don’t watch the ABC at all.
Though how they will explain the late Ordovician ice age when atmospheric CO2 was about 3,000 p.p.m. Probably ignore it.
TV weather forecasts–the ORIGINAL fake news. “People dropping like fly’s in latest 100 year heat wave–film at eleven.”
“You won’t be able to have the traditional beach holiday, you want to be staying inside”
Which (presumably?) means in air-conditioned hotels. That will do wonders for CO2 production…
As an example of the history revisionism some meteorologists are prepared to go to, read this account of stripping the world hottest record from El Azizia.
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/world-heat-record-overturneda-personal-account.html
Gotta love some of the drama
“I must say, at that point, I–and the rest of the committee–thought El Fadli was a dead man.” Gosh who knew meteorology was such dicing with death.
I also particularly liked the lines
“the dictator Gaddafi was gone … and El Fadli was back!” Hurray for our intrepid hero.
And
” Philip Eden of the Royal Meteorological Society and others uncovered information concerning the unreliability of the Bellani-Six type of thermometer that had apparently been used at Azizia in September 1922.”
You may ask yourself was the “Bellani-Six” better than the Bellani 5GT or inferior to the Ballani 7 Turbo? Well actually Bellani is just a brand of Six’s design that most people have at home or in their greenhouse for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six%27s_thermometer
How difficult are these things to read?
All I can say is that rewriting history (just like nostalgia) ain’t what it used to be.
“How difficult are these things to read?”
Humans viewing the unusual will change their gaze. Get closer. Concentrate more. So, even if difficult to read, the reader would make a very careful reading, knowing he may have to defend it later.
‘Cept maybe the guy at Furnace Creek. He may have been in a hurry to get out of there. But riddle me this, Batman: when you are in the middle of Death Valley, which way do you run?
We mustn’t forget that it’s ONLY Global Warming that causes climate change
Yeah, right; that big yellow star in our sky has nothing to do with it.
https://notrickszone.com/2023/07/19/europes-48c-horror-that-never-was-esa-media-sharply-criticized-for-manipulative-reporting/
“The animation below uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s radiometer instrument and shows the land surface temperature across Italy between 9 and 10 July. As the image clearly shows, in some cities the surface of the land exceeded 45°C, including Rome, Naples, Taranto and Foggia. Along the east slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, many temperatures were recorded as over 50°C.”
“Meant here were not the standard temperatures recorded at 2 meters above ground level that we always here in daily weather reports, which are much cooler, but rather those right at the ground surface.”
Any object in the sun can be any temperature at all, within reason. Who has not gone back to their car from the beach and found the steering wheel literally too hot to hold? So what?
Anyone foolish enough to read The Economist on climate matter will have seen this today (paywalled and I’m not a subscriber) spouting the ubiquitous hottest ever misinformation. But they are one of the TNI members plus recipients of Billy’s largesse, so hardly surprising: –
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/07/19/are-the-current-heatwaves-evidence-that-climate-change-is-speeding-up?utm_content=article-link-1&etear=nl_today_1&utm_campaign=a.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=7/19/2023&utm_id=1690295
Death Valley’s Furnace Creek Visitor Center has become a huge visitor attraction. The visitor centre is totally unsuitable for use as an accurate temperature station as it has palm trees parking lots, solar panels, air conditioning heat exchanger plants and an NPS operated weather station attached to the roof.
It is for all the above reasons that NOAH installed a new temp station close by at Stovepipe wells. This station is pristine and reflects the conditions that Death Valley used to have.
The Stovepipe Wells gauge however, shows no record temperature. It is never mentioned whenever Furnace Creek shows record temperatures. Wonder why we don’t hear about this??
I will posit an answer to your begged question, “Figure do not lie, but liars often figure.”
Prime Minister Disraeli said that there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The statistics he was referring to were the early ones of the 19th Century bureaucracies – piled up data with an occasional average thrown in; a caricature of scientific method. The point of the data gathering was to find concordance in the data.
After the first flush of enthusiastic collection of meaningless facts. statisticians realized that the aspect of data which was really useful in drawing sound conclusions was the disconcordance of the data. In other words its variance.
And after that statistics became “a really useful engine.” And it still is, when kept busy in the shunting yards.
Climate “scientists” are at best a throwback to the time before statistics was reworked as a science. That does not stop them pretending to use all sorts of mathematical nonsense, but “blinding with science” is exactly what non-scientists do.
Has anyone else been checking the temperatures across southern Europe this week? From what I see they are about average for the time of year and the reason why people enjoy going on holiday there. Examples of highs for today: Athens 38, Barcelona 27, Porto 24, Rome 35. Nothing like the ‘brutal’ temperatures the media have been going hysterical about.