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By Jo Nova
It’s another outbreak of the Hottest-ever-Day Fever , where buses catch fire, and the worlds top journalists forget to ask anyone anything useful about the last 500 million years.
Sunday was the Worlds Hottest Day says the Guardian
The Copernicus data might be fine and dandy but it only goes back as far as 1979. The warm weather we are having now is just a welcome break in a cooling trend that started 7,000 years ago. It not only isn’t a record that means anything, it’s almost certainly a net benefit to warm blooded mammals.
The collective amnesia about the Holocene and most of the history of human civilization is complete. Apparently the world is in uncharted territory, except for thousands of rocks, stones, spears, shells, bits of wood, pollen, diatoms, fossilized plant leaves, and all the ice cores we’ve ever dug up. 4,000 stone-age spears and whatnot that melted out of the Norwegian glaciers in the last few years, must have frozen into them sometime in the last 5,000 years. And all the bones of dogs, rabbits, geese and frogs found inside the Arctic circle suggest our world is too brutally cold now. Likewise […]
— (AAP) NZ Herald
By Jo Nova
In Carnarvon yesterday the Bureau tells us that the temperature was “a record” 49.9 degree day (almost 122 Fahrenheit). But in 1896 the Brickhouse Station just 15 kilometers north of Carnarvon hit 121 Fahrenheit in the shade, and there were reports of birds dying and other measurements “in the shade” that were as high as 125F. Somehow man-made emissions have been heating the planet for 128 years but the current freakishly hot days are about the same as the ones when no one in Australia owned a car and CO2 levels in the atmosphere were still under 300 ppm.
Lest we forget, there are hundreds of thermometer records from the pre-1908 era that are apparently worth nothing to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Climate change threatens all life on Earth, so you’d think climate scientists would be excited about the longest historical records they can find, but for some inexplicable reason they show little interest in the historical records from 1896 when a heatwave struck and 437 people died across Australia.
Temperatures hit 50C in the shade in many places in January 1896. In locations hundreds of kilometers apart, people were […]
By Jo Nova
Medieval “climate change” was filled with heatwaves, droughts, and crop failures
One thousand years ago, “rivers ran dry under the protracted heat, the fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours.” Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying.”
It was so hot in 1132 that the rivers ran dry and “the ground was baked to the hardness of stone”. Around 1200 at the Battle of Bela “there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons”. In 1303 and 1304, the Seine, the Loire, the Rhine, and the Danube could all be crossed with dry feet, and they dried up again in 1538-1541. In 1393 and 1394 the crops were “scorched up” and “great numbers of animals fell dead”. In 1625 in Scotland, it was so hot “meat could be cooked merely by exposing it to the Sun.”
And so it goes — history that was known in the 1800’s appears to be disappearing, leaving us with a generation of snowflakes who think they are the only humans who ever faced hot weather. They with their air-conditioned bedrooms, mobile phones and filtered water.
[…]
By Jo Nova
The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant
So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?
Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere. On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah. Who are we kidding?
Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 […]
By Jo Nova
A new paper estimates that if we increased our tree canopy in cities to 30% we could cool our cities by nearly half a degree. Works better than a windmill…
Photo by Maria Orlova
The trillion dollar global warming camp obsesses over 1.5°C of heat, but the urban heat island has already made our cities 1.5°C hotter than the countryside around them, and nobody gives a toss. Cities are where the lived human experience is for most of us, and despite the threat of that extreme heat made “worse by climate change”, no government does the obvious and sets a tree cover target. There are no Ministers of Regreening, and no carbon credits for suburbia. All we’re getting is concrete bollards and fifteen-minute-cities of pain.
In the green revolution instead of growing gum trees, people are cutting them down because they shade their solar panels. In our capital city they razed a majestic avenue of trees in order to add light rail. A true Green hates cars more than they like trees.
Urban flora not only cleans the air, it also reduces suicides, improves cardiac health, and reduces particulate pollution. One Canadian study estimated that […]
By Jo Nova The Nanny State strikes again
Apparently, there just aren’t enough real emergencies anymore, so we need to fake them up.
A couple of weeks ago, our billion dollar ABC, in cohoots with the Bureau of Meteorology, decided to report in prime time news that heatwaves are now so deadly serious we need New Emergency Warnings — “like a Bushfire emergency”, even though we get heatwaves every year, they hardly kill anyone and even five year olds know how to press the air conditioner button.
Back in 1896, Australians had to catch emergency trains and head for the hills the heat was so deadly. But apparently adult mammals are now so stupid they don’t know when it’s hot, and need to sit next to ABC Emergency radio all day in case “things change quickly” and someone needs to tell them to rush to the fridge for a glass of water.
I mean, it’s almost like heatwaves sneak up on people around hills at 100 miles an hour?
Either that or two government agencies want to scare more money out of Australian taxpayers:
New heatwave warning system adopted across Australia, using bushfire-style emergency alerts
by Tyne Logan, […]
In a surprise, mammals with a body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius do better in warmer weather
Who knew that global warming has saved 166,000 lives a year every year since 2000? Burn coal, save the world! Some countries are just not doing enough to help. Does your nation have a Net-100 Plan for 2050 to double CO2 emissions? It’s never too late to start. Countries that leave coal deposits undeveloped are not part of the solution.
Click to enlarge
Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think
Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal
… climate change has saved more lives from temperature-related deaths than it has taken. Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year—almost 600,000 deaths—but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually. As temperatures have risen since 2000, heat deaths have increased 0.21%, while cold deaths have dropped 0.51%. Today about 116,000 more people die from heat each year, but 283,000 fewer die from cold. Global warming now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.
Headlines predictably said “Heat Deaths Up 50%” since the year 2000. But Lomborg points out that most all […]
The Heat Dome was a freak local event
Once upon a time, scientists would say only 30 year trends counted. Now, all weather is climate except when it isn’t. Climate modelers know the heat over North East America was caused by your beef steak, but the cold over New Mexico was not even worth mentioning. (Nor apparently was the minus 81 in Antarctica a couple of weeks ago).
As Ryan Maue says: Overall the contiguous US is 1.4F below average.
…h/t Clarence.t WUWT
The Sun is already saying the Heat Dome “killed at least 500 people”. Strangely the February Texas freeze and blackouts may have killed 700 people, but five months later the media is still carefully waiting for confirmation before it puts that in a headline.
Blame the Pacific Ocean
Even NOAA says a Heat Dome is caused by La Nina and a local weather phenomenon:
This [heat dome] happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.”
A team of scientists funded by the NOAA MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the […]
This might be one of the most incompetent studies of 2o21
Hanigan, Dear and Woodward have done a “unique”, first of, *groundbreaking study* that finally shows climate change is having a detrimental effect on our health (so they say). With great effort to ignore almost every variable that mattered, they found the seasonal ratio of deaths in Australia has changed:
”More people die in winter than summer, but climate change may see this reverse
In our study published today, we show some of the first evidence climate change has had observable impacts on Australians’ health between 1968 and 2018.
We found long-term heating is associated with changed seasonal balance of deaths in Australia, with relatively more deaths in summer months and relatively fewer deaths in winter months over recent decades.
Our findings can be explained by the gradual global warming associated with climate change. Over the 51 years of our study, annual average temperatures increased by more than 1°C in Australia. The last decade (2011 to 2020) was the hottest in the country’s recorded history.
The other interpretation is that it got warmer and deaths in winter declined more than deaths in […]
Here’s the anti-witchdoctor kit for bushfires and “climate change”
Hi to all the new readers. Keep these graphs handy…
To Recap: In order to make really Bad Fires we need the big three: Fuel, oxygen, spark. Obviously getting rid of air and lightning is beyond the budget. The only one we can control is fuel. No fuel = no fire. Big fuel = Fireball apocalypse that we can;t stop even with help from Canada, California, and New Zealand.
The most important weather factor is rain, not an extra 1 degree of warmth. To turn the nation into a proper fireball, we “need” a good drought. A lack of rain is a triple whammy — it dries out the ground and the fuel — and it makes the weather hotter too. Dry years are hot years in Australia, wet years are cool years. It’s just evaporative cooling for the whole country. The sun has to dry out the soil before it can heat up the air above it. Simple yes? El Nino’s mean less rain (in Australia), that’s why they also mean “hot weather”.
So ask a climate scientist the right questions and you’ll find out what […]
Winning! The 1896 heatwave story is going viral and the ABC is reduced to weak, late excuses
Australians are realizing that our hot history has been hidden from us. We’ve set a new site traffic record with around 100,000 people checking in since Wednesday, plus thousands more reading the story elsewhere like Catallaxy and Facebook. Thank you for sharing! We first posted the 1896 heatwave here first in 2013, then again on Wednesday. The ABC has gone into damage control responding with a direct attempt to rebut the story, but they are too scared to name this site. What are they afraid of?
We, of course, have no such fear. Six years after skeptics let Australia know about the 1896 heatwave, the ABC and “experts” finally catch up but only under duress. So now they mention it, but use vague caveats, distractors, discuss different time spans, ignore 49 other hot sites, appeal to authority, and don’t mention their own recent artificial site changes that skeptics have documented in more detail than the BOM have. The “experts” allude to “thermometers on beer crates” but in Bourke the heat was recorded at the post office on Oxley st. Skeptics are well aware […]
Tuesday was Australia’s hottest day on record sayth the Bureau of Meteorology.
And perhaps it was. But look at the temperatures reported in newspapers across the country during the month of January in 1896 when people were going mad with axes, dropping dead in coaches and railway stations and birds were falling lifeless from the trees? Emergency trains were ferrying people from the country to the mountains. Panic stricken people fled the outback on special trains and the death toll was in the hundreds.
Fifty years later scientists would publish papers talking about how Australian summers had cooled since then.
How does the BOM know for sure that it was not hotter on any one of these days? Perhaps they don’t. Wouldn’t it be more honest of the BOM to mention that? It’s not like billions of dollars depends upon it…
Seems the only time the ABC or BOM suddenly discover our historic weather records is when we get unseasonal snow or freezing cold.
See below for the links to the newspaper stories for all of these temperatures (Click to enlarge the map)
Photo: Jo Nova
The heatwave started in the West on Jan 1st and travelled […]
Here’s an inconvenient fact: Australia had the highest number of very hot days in 1952, back when CO2 levels were 311ppm and humans had not yet emitted 87% of our carbon dioxide emissions. Something else was causing that extreme heat. If only the modelers knew what it was?
For years the BOM site had this informative graph below, but yesterday Craig Kelly M.P. phoned me to prepare for his Bolt Report appearance and informed me the Bureau had dropped it down the memory hole. It used to be a tab available on their Track climate trends and extremes page. Apparently in this era of global warming, the BoM doesn’t think Australians care about the trends in days over 40C in Australia, or perhaps it didn’t fit the agenda? On the Bolt Report last night Kelly explained that according to the Wayback machine, it disappeared sometime during the election campaign this year. (It was there on March 26th and gone on March 28th.)
Thankfully Paul Homewood of Notalotofpeopleknowthat kept a copy:
There’s not much a of a trend in the average number of very hot days (greater than 40C) each year in Australia. | Source: Australian Bureau of […]
Don’t believe your lying eyes — Australian newspaper archives are full of temperatures recorded higher than 121 in the shade which is 50C. All of these temperatures in the map below are found in historic newspaper archives. Measurements done after 1910 are even done with official Stevenson screens, yet the BOM “throws them away”. It’s true that ones done in the 1800s are often recorded on non-standard equipment, or are just literally “in the shade” under cover. So some of these, perhaps many, are one or two degrees too high. But even if we take two degrees off, how scary is global warming when Australia knew many days of 48C and 49C and some at 50C 120 years ago? The BOM — supposedly so concerned about the State of Our Climate — show little interest in talking about our history or in analyzing it, or even mentioning it.
And modern temperatures are recorded on electronic equipment, sometimes in areas affected by urban heat islands (concrete and cars).
(click to enlarge)
…
50C temperatures have occurred all over Australia before
Australians have been recording temperatures of over 50C since 1828, right across the country. In 1896 the […]
Cheap energy might save more lives than expensive “climate-changey” energy?
Researchers looked at 47 major cities in Spain, from 1980 to 2015 and checked 554,491 deaths. Even though temperatures have risen, less people are dying of heat in Spain. Apparently human ingenuity, energy and air conditioners were more than able to keep up with climate change. The population is older but less vulnerable to heat now than it was forty years ago.
Air conditioners rose from 5% of the population to 35% during the study period.
Oh the dilemma — to save lives, should we build more windmills to try to change the global climate or aim to get 100% of households access to an air conditioner?
Welcome to the dire threat of climate change:
The relative risk of death fell as temperatures rose (According to the model used). See the caption below.
From the Discussion in the paper:
The temporal evolution of heat-related mortality risks here found is, in general, consistent with those reported by previous studies in some other countries [12–15], which provide evidence for a decrease in vulnerability to climate warming despite the ageing of societies. For example, in Spain, the proportion of people […]
What happens to a poor tree when you withhold rain for a whole month, then hit it with four days in a row of 43C temperatures? It was so hot, some of the leaves on these trees got close to 49-50 °C.
In at least one gum species in Australia, the answer is “not much”. They suck up lots of water from their deep roots and sweat it out til the heatwave passes. The trees become evaporative coolers “siphoning up” water. They cope so well, that not only did the trees not die, but their trunk and height growth were unaffected. Indeed, only about 1% of the leaf area even exhibited browning.
Whole tree chambers in Richmond, New South Wales, Australia. Twelve 9-m-tall chambers in a field setting (a) enclose the canopies of individual Eucalyptus parramattensis trees rooted in soil (b). Two heatwave chambers can be seen on the left of the infrared image, along with several control chambers (c; temperature in °C).
But with global warming running at a heady 0.13C per decade, you might wonder how many years will it take for the trees to adapt?
From the paper — “one day”:
The gums rapidly […]
There is a deep asymmetry in science. Don’t take it from me, take it from the former President of American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a current Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program. Marshall Sheppard would know, he has written over “80 peer reviewed papers” which gives him secret weather knowledge. It’s a kind of smarts that people who analyze MRI scans, design aerofoils or find minerals 3,000m underground can only aspire to.
He’s worried that people are mocking climate change, just because snap-frozen sharks are washing up on the beach, and it’s hitting minus 50C in Canada. In the last twenty years mankind has put out more than a third of all the CO2 homo sapiens has ever made since Homo Erectus lit their last fire. Despite that whole extra blanket on the planet, the last time it was this cold was, like 1917.
So to help train believers Marshall Sheppard has written a handy retort to skeptical cynics:
Step One: It’s only cold where you are:
Girls and boys, global weather is hills and valleys. You are in a valley, but the crest of the wave is coming (or something like that).
Near surface […]
Hobartians face a record heatwave for November
Things are so serious they may find Echidnas in their dog’s water bowl.
Wildlife struggling to find water during the hot weather are likely to seek relief in your backyard. Photo: Emma C
Spend billions. Stop climate change. We simply can’t allow this kind of disaster:
Heatwave health alert issued for southern Tasmania as 130yo record set to fall
The weather bureau’s Tim Bolden said it was shaping up to be the first time Hobart has recorded six consecutive days on or above 25 degrees Celsius in November in nearly 130 years.
“[We’ll break the record] if we make it to the six days that we’re currently forecasting over 25 degrees — since last Saturday up until Thursday — and it’s certainly looking very likely,” Mr Bolden said.
“[We are] currently forecasting 28 for Tuesday, 29 for Wednesday and 29 for Thursday, having reached 30 last Saturday, 27 on Sunday and 27 on Monday.
“If we make it to that stretch of six days above 25 degrees, that would be a record heat spell for November, and equal to the maximum heat spell for […]
How convenient?! A new study shows that human influence on the climate started just before the major (and unerasable) heatwaves of the late 1930s, thus wrapping those awkward years under the banner of Man Made Climate. This study provides the handy peer reviewed link-bomb “answer” to that.
The inexplicable heat of the 1930s and 40s has been a constant source of pain for Global Worriers. Skeptics can point out that the decadal rate of warming was pretty much the same back then, even though CO2 was at the ideal, clima-perfecto level, of 310ppm. How could it be that massive 400ppm of CO2 was barely able to break the heat records set when CO2 was almost 25% lower?
Well, finally, mystery solved. A new Australian study compares models that don’t-explain-the-climate with CO2, to ones that-don’t-explain-the-climate without CO2. These models assume CO2 causes warming, so when they take out the CO2 factor that was added in to produce “the climate”, the models prove, ipso gloriousi, that CO2 causes warming. Indeed their method is so good, it can’t fail. As Anthony Watts says “it seems clear to me that the conclusion existed before the paper was written.” Quite.
Say hello to Climate Numerology […]
Despite the headlines, there was no paranormal extreme in Perth last week — just a game called heatwave bingo
Perth set a sort of record last week for four days in February above 40C. The BOM and media paraparazzi glorified the latest heatwave, chasing it like it was a celebrity Kendall-Jenner-type-event when it was not that different to the heatwaves we’ve had before. Before it came, there were headlines about how it was coming, there were minute-by-minute graphs of degrees C, stories of people cooking cupcakes in hot cars, and there were projections about hypothetical bigger, longer heatwaves that might come, maybe one day, someday: look out for “Temperatures into the fifties”!
Chris Gillham points out that this record was made at the Perth Metro station. Few seemed to mention that 9km away, at Perth Airport similar kinds of heatwaves were pretty common and things had been hotter and lasted longer in years gone by. This year the four day average at the airport was 42C but in 1956 there were 5 days at an average scorching 43.7. In 1933 there was a six day heatwave of 42C average in Perth city. And there were other heatwaves a lot like […]
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