Claim: “This summer is on track to be the hottest recorded on Earth.”
An article in Barron’s about rising food prices made the claim on Wednesday morning.
CNN’s headline proclaimed: “The world has just experienced the hottest summer on record – by a significant margin.”
You can find similarly alarming headlines from CBS News, the Guardian, and the Associated Press. [emphasis, links added]
Verdict: Misleading. Compared with most of the Earth’s history, this summer is unusually cold. The “record” referred to is kept by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization and European climate service Copernicus. It only goes back to 1940.
Researchers for the Smithsonian Institution surveyed the Earth’s temperatures over the last 500 million years. As you can see from the chart below, the Earth has been much hotter for most of the past 500 million years.
This study was not undertaken by climate change deniers. In fact, the researchers who undertook it wanted to prove how devastating climate change can be to life on Earth.
“The two researchers also thought a temperature curve could counter climate contrarians’ claim that global warming is no concern because Earth was much hotter millions of years ago. Wing and Huber wanted to show the reality of ancient temperature extremes—and how rapid shifts between them have led to mass extinctions. Abrupt climate changes, Wing says, ‘have catastrophic side effects that are really hard to adapt to,’” the Smithsonian wrote in 2019.
Even earlier on, the Earth was much, much hotter. When our planet was young and still being bullied by wayward mini-planets smashing through the solar system, the heat of these collisions would have kept Earth molten, with temperatures upward of 3,600° Fahrenheit, according to this piece on climate.gov.
That website—climate.gov—is the official climate information site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce.
Even if we zoom in on the time scale, as climate.gov did in their article, we can see that the Earth is far from the warmest it has ever been.
Let’s quote climate.gov again:
Modern human civilization, with its permanent agriculture and settlements, has developed over just the past 10,000 years or so. The period has generally been one of low temperatures and relative global (if not regional) climate stability.
Compared to most of Earth’s history, today is unusually cold; we now live in what geologists call an interglacial—a period between glaciations of an ice age.
So what is going on with all these media organizations claiming this is the hottest recorded summer on Earth? A lot of misleading work is being done by the phrase “on record” or the word “recorded” in the news stories.
The “record” referred to is kept by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization and European climate service Copernicus. It goes back only to 1940.
Apparently, the headline writers thought “Hottest Summer Since 1940” was just not alarming enough.
The records of fossilized corals, leaf shapes, ancient glaciations, and hothouse periods show that global temperatures are nowhere near as warm as they have been in the past.
It may be hot out there this summer—perhaps even the hottest in decades—but we are nowhere near the hottest temperatures the Earth has experienced.
Read more at Breitbart
They claimed 2014 was the Hottest Year the very same year when they had the Useful Idiots(Peoples)Climate March in NYC and left behind a Big Mess including Greenpeace Paper Cups
If only some people would do their homework.
The hotttest time on Earth was 50 million years ago at the peak of the Eocene Thermal Maximum. Sure, it would have been much hotter 3 billion years ago, but the significance of the Eocene Thermal Maximum is temperatures have been falling ever since.
Based on Earth’s climate history, it would seem we are heading for cold times folks, so now would be a good time to prepare – build lots of nuclear power stations because we are going to need a lot more electricity to keep billions of people warm and alive, plus animals and plant foods growing in heated sheltered facilities.
Come on Col, history only started in the 1970’s when the temps were at the lowest (when we were about to go into a new Ice Age until we didn’t). And even when the climate alarmist “scientists” deign to show earlier times the erase the high temps of the 1930s, they use the ridiculous “hockey stick” created by the fraud Michael Mann (who should have been fired by Penn State when the EmailGate dump occurred–I read every email string and was appalled at what they were doing).
There is one thing missing from the most recent articles on this summer’s warming from both the articles and those commenting. The Tonga Eruption increased the water vapor mass in the stratosphere by 13%. Water is a potent green house gas. Very typical of the climate change movement they have focused on the warming but ignored the most likely cause because it isn’t carbon dioxide. Some alarmists have pointed out that there was a delay between the eruption and warming, but such delays are common.
To avoid confusion we need to remember the impact on the climate of a huge eruption depends on what is injected into the atmosphere. Eruptions are not the same. Sulfates cause cooling by reflecting some of the solar radiation back into space.
We had some Hot Days back in July but July is always Hot Month its always been that way it has nothing to do with Global Warming/Climate Change its just today we have he Globalists idiots and the Eco-Freaks getting involved the UN and Greenpeace