Don’t Fall For Justin Rowlatt’s Global Heatwave Con Trick
By Paul Homewood
Justin Rowlatt plays the shell game:
It is hot. Very hot. And we are only a few weeks into summer.
Texas and part of the south-west of the US are enduring a searing heatwave. At one point, more than 120 million Americans were under some form of heat advisory, the US National Weather Service said. That is more than one in three of the total population.
In the UK, the June heat didn’t just break all-time records, it smashed them. It was 0.9C hotter than the previous record, set back in 1940. That is a huge margin.
There is a similar story of unprecedented hot weather in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
No surprise, then, that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather forecasts said that globally, June was the hottest on record.
And the heat has not eased. The three hottest days ever recorded were in the past week, according to the EU climate and weather service, Copernicus.
The average world temperature hit 16.89C on Monday 3 July and topped 17C for the first time on 4 July, with an average global temperature of 17.04C.
Provisional figures suggest that was exceeded on 5 July when temperatures reached 17.05C.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66143682
It’s summer, so inevitably some places are hot! But Justin Rowlatt wants you to focus on those and ignore all the other places that aren’t.
The full picture tells a totally different story. Across the world as a whole, there is the usual mix of above and below temperatures:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
The only exception is Antarctica, and the Climate Reanalyzer website has added this special note explaining this, no doubt concerned at the way the media and climate scientists have misled the public about the significance of the spike in temperatures:
It is of course winter down under, and temperatures in and around Antarctica are still well below freezing, even though they may be 10C higher than average.
Such intrusions of moist, warm air from lower latitudes into polar air mass are not unusual, as we have frequently seen in the Arctic in recent years during winter months. And it is precisely this phenomenon which makes the whole idea of an average global temperature totally meaningless. It all has to do with water vapour.
Because polar regions are so dry, a small change in heat produces a large swing in polar temperature, whereas it requires much more energy change to produce the same size swing in temperatures in the mid-latitudes. This is because of the fact that water has a much higher heat capacity than air.
Think, for instance, of the Sahara Desert. Temperatures fall away dramatically at night because the dry air holds so little heat.
Although average global temperatures may have increased because of the warm air brought to the Antarctic, the overall heat content of the Earth’s atmosphere has not changed.
But Justin Rowlatt would like you to think that the world is burning up because of a few sunny days last month.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Paul – it may also be AI:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/07/11/1076067/weather-forecasting-is-having-an-ai-moment/?truid=&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=&utm_content=07-11-2023&mc_cid=3ae370ef63&mc_eid=f9ccbce610
Update on this story . Watts Up With That have just caught up with this , and show how the whole thing is just computer simulation and the normal green loonie lies .https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/07/13/opening-up-a-can-of-climate-whoop-ass-on-this-guy/
So their claimed 17C is really just the normal 14C .
Rowlatt also says; “The North Atlantic, for example, is currently experiencing the highest surface water temperatures ever recorded.
That marine heatwave has been particularly pronounced around the coasts of the UK, where some areas have experienced temperatures as much as 5C above what you would normally expect for this time of year.”
Clearly wants to give casual readers the impression that the entire North Atlantic is 5 degrees warmer than usual – how much heat would that take, I wonder? And can it be even remotely true in early July when sea temperatures normally rise for another two months before reaching their annual maximum?
“normally expect” = average.
This is the endless fraud that goes on. The average contains historical data that is higher than the average – around 50% of the data will be, assuming a normal distribution. So without telling us what the maximum is in the average, hes being fraudlent.
I don’t see any problem in reading ‘average’ and ‘normally expected’ as essentially the same thing.
Meteo France includes figures for individual towns/cities comparing current daily maxima and minima with average for the month on its website.
These are not intended to be scientific data but are of interest to the lay user.
For what it’s worth the current figures for the half-dozen locales I’ve checked this morning are around +6° for minima and in all cases -1° for maxima. Interesting but no more than that.
I have measured sea temperatures locally in south devon for some years. They are a fraction above other temperatures over the last 20 years (0.5C) mainly because it has been so sunny. As I quickly found out when I first started measuring, hot unbroken strong sun for day after day during the last few weeks of May and then all of june will have a very big effect.
Presumably the increased sub is due to weather patterns but primarily because there is less pollution
The extreme UK marine heatwave faded pretty quickly. Much more mixed picture now.
Climate editor Rowlatt just doing his job —editing the climate.
Editing….but make lots of ‘typos’!
What on Earth can be in it for the catastrophists?
“In the UK, the June heat didn’t just break all-time records, it smashed them. It was 0.9C hotter than the previous record, set back in 1940. That is a huge margin.”
But, those daily records only go back to 1979 (satellites). That leaves out all records (warm or cool) prior to 1979. Misinformation?
The problem is, it’s the average for June. Which isn’t “hotter”. Having say 20 days that are 23 degrees rather than 10 days that are 23 and 10 days that are 22 degrees gives a higher average but it isn’t “hotter” because that makes no sense in the context of an average. And it was caused by a long-lasting static high, not CO2. The entire claim is nonsensical.
These ‘records’ are the product of computer games (models) from University of Maine and then repeated by European sycophants. They are not from measurements. NOAA has refused to endorse these ludicrous and false claims.
Now July in UK is going to be below average in temp, are they going to shout about that. (Long range Jetstream forecast is pretty ugly = cool and windy for rest of month).
Yet nowhere in the entire UK exceeded 32.2C 90F. It wasn’t extreme heat, it was uniformity of warmth. A statistical quirk.
It is probably tot in Texas – but the National Public Radio does not tell us temperature. Only a “heat index”. Could a “heat index” be a way to create new records?
Grrrrh .. it is probably Hot in Texas …
I wonder what Rowlatt would say if, as my family and I did in 1982, found himself on Myrtle Beach SC, in a camper, with a temp of 90F and humidity of 95% – at 11:00 at NIGHT! (according to local radio).
Difference is, I didn’t think the world was about to end in a fireball; but then again, I wasn’t being paid to say so.
You accuse Rowlett of cherry picking the hottest places but he is only using them as examples to illustrate the global temperature trend. Obviously the full picture takes account of the entire globe. That is what the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather did with its ERA 5 analysis (which Rowlett refers to) and the result was the hottest June on record. Maybe this was because heat was moved into the Antarctic and is more sensitive to heat than other places but you say this has happened before and it didn’t lead to such a high global temperature.
The record is tiny. You think that in the last 50 years or so we have experienced every possible June? That’s idiotic. And June is arbitrary. Weather is continuous, picking a small slice out and comparing it with other slices isn’t science, it’s children’s games. And the analysis isn’t data, it’s computer simulations that disagree with the actual data.
So try again.
“The record is tiny. ”
How do you decide what is tiny? There doesn’t seem to be a way of posting images here but if you look here: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2023/copernicus-records-first-june-breach-15degc-climate-threshold#:~:text=The%20global%2Dmean%20surface%20air,implemented%20by%20ECMWF%20has%20said. You will see it is quite a noticeable jump compared to other recorded Junes.
“You think that in the last 50 years or so we have experienced every possible June? That’s idiotic. And June is arbitrary. Weather is continuous, picking a small slice out and comparing it with other slices isn’t science, it’s children’s games”
I think you are saying it could just be random variation. That would require a statistical model to estimate the probability of such a temperature and most sceptics don’t like models.
“And the analysis isn’t data, it’s computer simulations that disagree with the actual data.”
What makes you think ERA 5 is a computer simulation? It uses real data from many sources. All data needs analysing but that is not simulation.
20,000 years since the last Ice Age, 150 years of data. Less than 1%. Tiny by any definition. Hundreds of possible variations of thousands of variables, so the possible combinations are vast. Probability we’ve seen most of a vast number when we’ve seen a small number of them? Very, very small. AR5 relies on models. That’s the trouble with relying on what you are told, it means you don’t know how to think.
“20,000 years since the last Ice Age, 150 years of data. Less than 1%.”
I don’t understand the significance of the 20,000 years . We have 150 years of data. I think you are saying (but it is not entirely clear) that with so much data you are bound to get the odd month which breaks 1.5C. That depends on the spread of the data. If the distribution is normal and the spread indicates a SD of say 0.2C then a measurement in excess of 1.5C (>7 sigma) by chance is almost impossible.
1% of what? I don’t get that at all.
“AR5 relies on models.”
By AR5 are you talking about IPCC assessment reports? They do make extensive use of models as does AR6, but the measurements that are being reported are ERA5 which is something different. ERA 5 is an analysis of multiple sources of data from the ECMWF to assess various temperatures – no simulation models involved.
“That’s the trouble with relying on what you are told, it means you don’t know how to think.”
I am pretty confident about my ability to think independently 🙂
“I don’t understand the significance of the 20,000 years “
Please Mark, try to pay attention.
It is all of these so-called climate scientists who keep trying to persuade us that it is the hottest times times in human history,
If you have a problem with them, I would suggest you complain to the BBC who keep pushing these lies. For instance:
“Chances are that July will be the warmest ever, and with it the hottest month ever: ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian which is some 120,000 years ago,” said Karsten Haustein, from the University of Leipzig.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66104822
Or maybe you could explain to us why you find such lies acceptable?
If the distribution is normal…
Why is it normal? Weather and climate are serially correlated phenomena which make it very unlikely that measured parameters will follow a normal distribution.
To qualify we have 150 years of instrumental record temperature data so I can explain the “significance of the last 20,000 years ” Mark .. 14700 years ago the Greenland temperature series shows a warming increase of 10C over just 3 years ..Several millennia later around 11700 BP the climate warmed again by 10C over 50-60 years … Paleo-temperature
proxy data have furthermore established that temperatures were indeed considerably warmer during the Holocene Thermal Optimum and the Roman Optimum . And yet we are expected to believe a mere 1C temperature rise over 170 years is the precipice of a “climate emergency” ?
So he’s cherry-picking his examples.
….and, from a recent post on WUWT reminds me, Mark is demonstrating the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
He’s cherry picking his computer games. These are not measured temps – just ‘Modelled’ (faked) temps.
http://temperature.global/
This site uses readings from tens of thousands of gauges around the world , and unlike a lot of the others , does not adjust the results to show what the global warming nutters want .
It proved that the ” World is Hotter than ever ” is a lie , as Rowlands 17 degrees was really only 14 degrees odd over the last week .
It also shows that for the last 8 years the world has been below the 30 year average temperature .
But the nutters will still keep coming out with their lies and using fake readings in their attempts to con people about climate change and to destroy Western economies so that their ” One World Socialist Government ” can take over .
https://www.technocracy.news/un-agenda-2030-a-recipe-for-global-socialism/
The site just says – “takes the average” – without any description of what that means. How do they allow for the fact that temperature readings are far more dense in North America and Europe than they are in Africa and the polar regions? Do they allow for shifts in observation time? Do they allow for UHI? And so on ….
You didn’t bother to watch the site for a few minutes which would have shown you that the sites being sampled (at a rate of over 60,000 sites per hour when I looked) are spread across the world.
Nor did you bother to scroll down to discover that the calculated temperature is a rolling annual average of all the sampled sites.
In short you made no attempt to answer your own questions.
“The site just says – “takes the average” – without any description of what that means. How do they allow for the fact that temperature readings are far more dense in North America and Europe than they are in Africa and the polar regions? Do they allow for shifts in observation time? Do they allow for UHI? And so on ….”
Strewth man, they use real figures and don’t manipulate them as you would seem to prefer. Both my six thermometer and my thermocouple are reading 22°C right now, I have no need to adjust their readings to compare them to yesterday’s or last year’s or any other day’s temperatures. The website mentioned is using data from the same sources on an ongoing basis.
I guess you took the reading about lunchtime. Suppose you take the next reading tomorrow at 9:00 am. How do you compare them? Different sites take readings at different times and there are occasional changes in the chosen times. (It is actually more complicated than that because they measure the maximum and minimum temperature in the last 24 hours – but the same principle applies). This is just one of the complexities you have to take into account if you are seriously going to compare temperatures over a long time and a large geography. Just taking all the readings and taking an arithmetic mean is meaningless.
Came across this today. Very down to earth assessment of Science of Climate change. Two quotes: cancel the Climate crisis; and critically assess IPCC reports for accuracy, as the summary reports use to make political decisions do not reflect the proceedings of the various committees
I don’t know how they are getting SW France as above average. It isn’t and hasn’t been. Indeed the last 2 weeks haven’t been much of summer at all really.
Here in Adelaide (mostly in the Hills) this year has been cold and wet. Still yesterday washing was outside on the lines all day. (Haven’t seen that since April?). Hope it will be the same today but the forecast is for wet days again next week. Must be due to Global Warming!
The Climate Reanalyzer website ‘Special Notice’:
“The purpose of the interactive chart and maps on this page is to view daily snapshots of temperature as estimated from the Climate Forecast System. The increase in mean global temperature since the start of July, estimated from the Climate Forecast System, should not be taken as an “official” observational record.”
So readers are informed of estimates from forecasts. Yet Rowlatt’s fellow BBC propagandist Matt McGrath translated those into ‘records’.
“Climate change: World’s hottest day since records began”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66104822
Joe, do you think there’s a case here for Ofcom to rule that the report was false because it failed to include the fact that the ‘record temps were modelled and not based on actual measurements?
The BBC are treading in dodgy ground here, IMO. (But, of course, they can do no wrong because they are now our very own MiniTru – doing the bidding of a corrupt government (no matter it’s colour).
Ofcom expects complainants to complain first to the BBC, to give it the opportunity to admit its own error.
Paul’s readership has many practised apnea exponents.
“No surprise, then, that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather forecasts said that globally, June was the hottest on record.”
Call me picky but how can a forecast “say” that June (last month) was ……the record? A future event – forecast – becomes able to record a past event as ….fact? How can a so called Journalist write such a piece, regardless of content, and it get through whatever is what BBC News calls an editorial process?
I know like loads of NALOPKTsters The BBC is a self evident failing organisation; they are narrative driven, ignorant and survive only because of the Licence fee; they also are allowing fervent anti Tory ( and I’m no Tory) abuse of a horrendous nature by a rabble on their HYS – which is against their stated “rules”. Wont surprise folks here but the scale of it might.
On the same day, this was posted by the BBC but has quickly disappeared:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66155057
I had a good laugh at their last comment: ‘it is not known what part climate change played in the event’
I guess Justin was too busy writing his little piece to see what other reports were around.
‘Because polar regions are so dry, a small change in heat produces a large swing in polar temperature, whereas it requires much more energy change to produce the same size swing in temperatures in the mid-latitudes. This is because of the fact that water has a much higher heat capacity than air.
Think, for instance, of the Sahara Desert. Temperatures fall away dramatically at night because the dry air holds so little heat.’
Paul, I think you have this wrong: Both the Sahara and the Antarctic are deserts, one of the features they have in common is the dryness of the air, but the reason they lose their heat so quickly is because water vapour is the most effective greenhouse gas, and its absence means that the surface radiates its heat rapidly to space. It is a good example of how small the greenhouse effect is from CO2. In its liquid form, water certainly has a higher heat capacity compared to land, but as far as I am aware, this is not the case when water is in its gaseous form.
Water has some weird properties, so I may be wrong.
Whatever the case, it certainly contradicts the idea that using hydrogen as a fuel only produces water (vapour) so is harmless to the environment. Can we now call water vapour a contaminant?
“water certainly has a higher heat capacity compared to land, but as far as I am aware, this is not the case when water is in its gaseous form.”
Paul are you saying you do not understand Specific Heat? Promise me you are not a physicist.
Regarding free H2, it is extremely rare in the natural environent on earth. The problem lies with fugitve emissions of H2 which readily react with atmospheric OH+ (hydroxyl radicals) which would otherwise react with CH4 to render down to CO2. This causes CH4 to reamin in the atmosphere for longer.
As a result the IPCC now give H2 a GWP (global warming radiative forcing equivalent ) of almost 11 where CO2 is a benchmark of 1. H2 is defined as an indirect greenhous gas.
The combustion temperature of H2 in air is such that Nitrogen reacts with O2 to produce NOX (in addition to H2O) which is a much bigger and genuine problem.
Specific heat of water circa 4 kJkg-1K-1.
Specific heat of granite/sand circa 0.8
This 5-fold difference is what I guess Paul is working on.
Now take the atmosphere:
Specific heat (SH) of water vapour = circa 2kJkg-1K-1, so around half of water in its liquid state. In a dry atmosphere there is little to no water, so specific heat is that of Oxygen/Nitrogen, which both have a SH of around 1 kJkg-1K-1. Water vapour in the mid-latitudes is on average circa 2%, so means it would have a SH of around 1.04.
S0 the difference is very small, in comparison to the bare earth/ocean analogy it is around 100 times less.
Perhaps now you can understand why I thought it worth a mention.
As for your comments about H2 as a greenhouse gas, what does that have to do with my comments about water vapour? Or have you made the same mistake as reading Cambridge for Oxford?
Here we go again, another push to declare the Anthropocene.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66132769
O/T Scotland is flattening one side of a lo of roundabouts
… https://youtu.be/d30-LKrUr0A
Spoiler : to get wind turbine towers down the road
Only a bit OT. A discussion I very recently had with an old friend was the perception people have of temperature relative to age and general fitness. In the legendary summer of 1976 I was 20 and happily doing (poor) impersonations of John Snow coming in from the Nursury End at Lords for my local village cricket team.
I may have sweated buckets but never felt heat distress because I was young and fit. Age expectancy back then, though ,was much lower. Almost half a century on and I would struggle to impersonate Ray Illingworth bowling slow on a cool day without over-heating in a couple of overs. Weirdly, though, it is now the young who should be (but, in the main probably aren’t) least affected by a warm spell but they seem to be the ones getting all het up up by propaganda like this drivel by Justin Rowlatt.
Doesn’t this say a lot more about our society than any climate issues? As my friend commented – ask a youngster where milk comes from and they are just as likely to reply….a bottle. Very sad.
I am mid 60s and come from a long line of hill farmers. I just accept the weather for what it is, dress accordingly and carry on. Having said that, I think it’s certainly the case that we have experienced a benign warming in the winter since the late 1970s. Summer I am less sure about. Two day spikes of heat are not a good guide to climate change, and good summers can occur as random weather events e.g. 1959, 1969, 1975, 1976, 1983 and so on. Summer maxima may have inched up but the real change has been in the length and snowiness of winter – even though nature can still strike back, witness the cold waves of 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2018. Yes, some memories are short!
‘Such intrusions of moist, warm air from lower latitudes into polar air mass are not unusual, as we have frequently seen in the Arctic in recent years during winter months.@
Sounds like ideal conditions for dumping lots of snow.
I was in Scotland for ten days in June and the weather was unusually warm, reaching the mid 20s. I think an earlier analysis by Paul showed that CET temperatures were nothing unusual, so perhaps the reason for the recent UK ‘record’ was the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland were blessed with pleasant warm summer weather over a sustained period? The locals in Argyle certainly weren’t complaining!
Here in Colorado the average temperature for the month was 64.2 degrees 4 degrees below the average.
The rainfall here in June for Denver was was 6.10 inches of rain. The highest since records began.
For the first time in about 23 years the entire state is drought free. This will not last, of course – this is an semi-arid high altitude climate and parts of it are always have drought. But I am guessing that “drought” will be large in the “climate” headlines over the rest of the year.
Just put on a Jersey watching Wimbledon in Somerset. Note that the upcoming El Niño looks like diminishing by FMA or MAM next year towards neutral. Then another 30 month La Niña will have the alarmists blubbering.
I brought up the BBCref. on page 2.I quote verbatim
“-says Tim Lenton,professor of climate change at Exeter University.Most of the extra heat trapped by the build up of greenhouse gases has gone into warming the surface ocean,he explains.That extra heat tends to get mixed downwards towards the deeper ocean,but movements in oceans currents-like El Nino-can bring it back to the surface.
When that happens,a lot of that heat gets released into the atmosphere,”says Prof Lenton,”driving up the temperatures”.
All of of the above is impossible,ending with a perpetuum mobile of the second kind.
Dear oh dear.
Betts talking his usual climate bollocks I note and this
“In other regions, around Australia, in the Mediterranean, entire ecosystems changed, kelp forests disappeared, and seabirds and whales starved,” she says.
says Friederike Otto, a climatologist at the Grantham Institute of Climate Change at Imperial College London.
the usual utter excreta and ‘grantham’ suspects then.
Rowlatt is England’s answer to Saint Greta of Thunderpants.
There is mountains of evidence that life in the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods was better than in the Little Ice Age.
The only Climate “interest” (certainly not even a “concern” or “worry”, let alone a “catastrophe”) is this dystopian, venal, virtue signalling, queer “religion” requiring us to destroy Western Civilisation and install vast amounts more Ruinable “Energy”, the obviously failed “Solution” to a “Problem” that can’t be shown to exist.
Twenty years past the time when the zealot high priests should have been challenged and harshly held to account.
Rowlatt tells us that the previous record was set in 1940 – was that due to Global Warming as well? Or does he blame the Luftwaffe?
More scientists need to speak out against the climate cult: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/07/14/nobel-physics-laureate-2022-slams-climate-emergency-narrative-as-dangerous-corruption-of-science/
Warmunism requires initiation of force, but has no traction south of the Equator. Our thermometers have not yet been rigged to produce fake data. Then again, perhaps the Brewer-Dobson effect really does keep the hemispheres from mixing so South of the Equator is cooler.
BBC Science journalism proceeds one scandal at a time.
However the deeper problem is the BBC continuing Charter breaking institutional bias against open debate, particularly in insisting “consensus” equals science. They enable the Rowlatt’s. Deeper still is the Westminster bubble that covers for the bbc and lack the will (intelligence?) to challenge or admonish.