About That Claim That July 3-4 Were the 'Hottest Days on Record'...

The headlines were stark and specific. Reuters claimed, “World registers hottest day ever recorded on July 3.”

Well, “ever recorded” is misleading since the records have only been “recorded” since 1979. But what kind of a headline would that have been?

At least the BBC was honest about their scare headline: “World’s hottest day since records began.”

The bottom line: We’re all going to burn up and we’re all going to die unless we throw an hysterical climate change tantrum and demand that our government take panicky steps to save us from the climate change demons.

There’s no doubt that this Independence Day was hot. It was very hot. It was uncomfortably hot if you were dumb enough to spend time outdoors. That’s why God created air conditioning and double-scoop chocolate ice cream cones.

But should we be worried that it’s very hot in the Western Hemisphere during the summer? The people and groups who want you worried want you to forget that prosaic fact.

Stephen Milloy, a noted climate change skeptic, performed the necessary lobotomy on the hysterics in the Wall Street Journal.

The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. The claimed temperature was derived from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.

One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.

Obviously, the only hominids around 125,000 years ago — Neanderthals who didn’t give a fig about climate change — refused to share data from their earth-orbiting satellites, so that information isn’t currently available. The Neanderthals may eventually have been done in, at least partly, by climate change, so maybe they should have paid more attention to the data.

Thankfully, the hysterics don’t have the last word on the meaning of those very, very hot July 3-4, double-scoop chocolate ice cream days.

A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something 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 been steady this year, with no spike in July.

Moreover, 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. The Earth and its atmosphere is large and diverse, and no place is meaningfully average.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the “average global temperature” hysteria is that the entire system put in place by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been corrupted. The Heartland Institute alerted the media to this fact a year ago.

The report, published by The Heartland Institute, was compiled via satellite and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations that contribute to the “official” land temperature data in the United States. The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link), and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.

Most of us already take the hysterical blathering of the climate change industry with a grain of salt. I’ll take mine with two scoops of Chocolate-Chocolate Chip, please.