On those “hottest days in history” – HotAir – News Block

Earlier this week, depending on where you live, you may have noticed a bit of a heat wave during the 4th of July celebrations. But as Bege pointed out on Thursday, simply pointing out that it was a hot day in July wasn’t good enough for the climate cultists in legacy media. They brought out “experts” to declare that Tuesday and Wednesday were the “hottest days on record”, if not the “hottest days on record”. It was such a peculiar story that others began digging into the details to see if there was any merit to the idea or if it was all hogwash. In the Wall Street Journal, Steve Milloy of the Energy and Environmental Law Institute elaborated further. Unsurprisingly, even without being buried in reams of scientific studies, those claims were largely meaningless and, frankly, “absurd.” We are talking about fractions of a degree and measures that vary greatly depending on the location being measured. (Subscription required)

An obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there is no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures cannot be fairly compared to global temperature guesses from thousands of years ago.

A more likely alternative to the 62.6 degree estimate is around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have held steady this year, with no spikes in July.

Also, the notion of “average global temperature” is meaningless. Average global temperature is a concept invented by and for the global warming hypothesis. It is more a political concept than a scientific one. Earth and its atmosphere are large and diverse, and no place is significantly average.

Milloy punches one hole after another through the entire parade of hysteria, including the 125,000-year theory. Temperatures across the planet are constantly changing, and known trends are often ignored by climate alarmists due to their inconvenient nature. For example, “average” temperatures are always higher in the Northern Hemisphere during the summer than in the Southern Hemisphere during the opposite three-month period. Because? Because there is much more dry land capable of absorbing sunlight in the north, while a larger percentage of the southern hemisphere is covered by oceans.

Milloy also delves into the problems of the instrumentation that is used. That’s a topic we’ve covered here before. The vast majority of thermometers NOAA uses are improperly installed and produce corrupted readings that skew almost entirely to the side of producing warmer records. And the satellite temperature measurements on which many of its readings are based are sometimes spotty.

It’s also worth wondering if these people ever get tired of being wrong. Going back to the ’90s, we were repeatedly warned by everyone from Al Gore to Greta Thunberg that if we didn’t take everyone’s cars away immediately, all polar sea ice would be gone in five, seven, or 10 years. Those clocks have run out and the Arctic ice pack is growing, despite the best efforts of climate alarmists to explain the phenomenon. The Antarctic block is breaking up in places, but there is still plenty of ice.

Here’s another fun fact recently pointed out to me related to all the screaming about carbon dioxide emissions. Without doing any research, what would be your guess as to what percentage of the planet’s atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide? I am not a scientist, and I confess that when asked, I ventured a guess of 5 percent or so. But it turns out that CO2 and methane are part of the “trace gases” that make up 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. That is four hundredths of one percent. Our atmosphere is almost 80% nitrogen and just under 20% oxygen. And that 0.04 percent carbon dioxide is all the plants have to live on. (And produce more oxygen for us.) If the level drops below 0.02%, all the plants start to die and then we all become extinct.

But that won’t stop the folks at “Hottest Day Evah.” You’re not supposed to pay attention to science. You’re supposed to follow science. Best of luck with that to all of you. I’m going to fire up my gas grill for some burgers before the FBI gets here.