USA heat wave! But is it really hot?

News analysis

The media is abuzz this summer about the scorching heat, and in most parts of the country all it takes is one step outside to feel what all the fuss is about: It’s really hot out there.

But just how hot is it, really?

Or maybe the question should be: Just how hot is it, comparatively?

Well, the mainstream media thinks it knows. Take CNN — representative of the legacy media on the issue: “Deadly heatwaves are baking the US. Scientists just reported that July will be the hottest month on record. … Scientists this week reported that this summer’s unrelenting heat wave would have been ‘virtually impossible’ were it not for the planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels. They also confirmed that July will go down as the hottest month on record — and almost certainly that the planet’s temperature is hotter now than it has been in around 120,000 years.”

120,000 years! That’s pretty scary stuff.

As it turns out, there are scientists and climatologists who don’t agree with all the assumptions, much less on the calculations, and this past week they made their case.

At the top of the list was meteorologist Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the conservative Heartland Institute’s climate change center and the owner of the popular climate blog, Watts Up With That?. His take on the data diverges sharply from that of CNN’s bevy of scientists.

“A number of media outlets are claiming that U.S. heatwaves are getting worse this week due to climate change,” Watts wrote this week. “This is false. Actual data from temperature measurements show that heatwaves in the U.S. are on the decline even as climate change has occurred over the last 75 years.”

As Watts acknowledges, it is hot in the U.S., but he says it’s mainly because it’s summer, not because of climate change. However, Watts asserts, the media sees climate change behind every heat wave, and seeks to exploit a connection, even though one doesn’t exist.

“For example, last week it was declared that the world had seen its hottest day ever on July 4, with some outlets claiming the ‘hottest in 100,000 years,’” he wrote.

That, too, was false, Watts contends. The problem is, he argues, none of those articles was actually data driven.

“None of the news outlets running heat wave stories this week examined or cites historical data on heat waves, preferring instead to push scary numbers in the form of heat indexes that combine temperature and humidity, reprint the opinion of ‘climate scientists,’ and reference computer models that suggest climate change is making heat waves worse,” he wrote.

“The thing is,” he said, such data exists, “for any reporter with a modicum of journalistic curiosity to find.” 

The problem for the media is, he opined, the actual data doesn’t look that scary.

Watt a surprise

In his piece, Watts pointed to a webpage of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that keeps historical data on heat waves, and he says he found a surprise.

“Despite the claims of climate change creating worse heatwaves, the data the EPA has compiled going back to 1948 says exactly the opposite,” he wrote.

In particular, the EPA measures unusually hot temperatures at individual weather stations that have operated consistently since 1948, the agency states on the website. The term “unusually hot” refers to a daily maximum temperature that is hotter than the 95th percentile temperature during the 1948–2020 period, Watts explained, meaning that the maximum temperature on a particular day at a particular station would be considered “unusually hot” if it falls within the warmest 5 percent of measurements at that station during the 1948–2020 period. 

“The EPA’s data for 1,066 weather stations across the United States showed a total of 863 stations, or 81 percent, reporting either a decrease or no change in the number of unusually hot days,” Watts wrote. “By comparison, only 19 percent of all weather stations reported an increase in the number of unusually hot days since 1948.”

The data has also been adjusted to rule out geographical bias. But, as Watts pointed out, not all bias was eliminated. In fact, some locations actually bias the findings toward hotter temperatures that might really be occurring, Watts asserts.

“Many of the stations showing hotter temperatures over the 1948-2020 period were located at airports or otherwise badly sited locations that created heat biases such as reported by the study Climate Realism covered last year, Corrupted Climate Stations: The U.S. Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed,” he wrote. “As reported in that study, much of the upward heat bias occurs in the minimum overnight temperature at these weather stations, enabling them to reach higher than expected daytime high temperatures had they not had a ‘head start’ from the warmer than expected overnight low.”

The bottom line is, Watts reports, the maximum temperatures — the kind that would occur in a heat wave — have not changed much since 1948. 

“In fact, there are spikes of high temperatures in the U.S. in 1954 and in 1963 that are higher than the present day,” he wrote, adding that minimum temperatures have had a slow and steady rise since 1948, with peaks in the last 20 years (warmer nights) being higher than values in the 1940s and 1950s.

Finally, Watts wrote of the data, another graph from the EPA shows that heat waves were actually the worst for the U.S. in the 1930s, well before climate change became a blip on the media radar. 

“The bottom line is this: despite what the media says, real-world data shows heat waves are not getting worse in the United States due to climate change,” Watts wrote. “This flies in the face of opinions by climate scientists cited in the mainstream media which seems wedded to the narrative that climate change is causing a crisis, despite data to the contrary.”

Curry is curious

Meanwhile, Judith Curry, the former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a former member of the NOAA Climate Working Group, who is described by the left as a climate denier and by others as a neo-skeptic, has said that until science can explain early 20th century global warming, there should be little confidence in current alarmist models and predictions. 

In particular, Curry has cited a paper by Gabi Hegerl, Stefan Bronniman, Andrew Shurer, Tim Cowan, “The early 20th century warming: Anomalies, causes and consequences,” which observed that most pronounced warming in the historical global climate record prior to recent warming occurred over the first half of the 20th century and is known as the Early Twentieth Century Warming (ETCW). 

“Understanding this period and the subsequent slowdown of warming is key to disentangling the relationship between natural variability and the response to human influences in the present and future climate,” the scientists wrote.

Warming in the first half of the twentieth century could not have been explained by greenhouses gases, they wrote, at least not half of it.

“Attribution studies estimate that about a half of the global warming from 1901 to 1950 was forced by a combination of increasing greenhouse gases and natural forcing, offset to some extent by aerosols,” they wrote. “Natural variability also made a large contribution, particularly to regional anomalies like the Arctic warming in the 1920s and 1930s.”

The period also featured some exceptional events, the scientists found: Indian monsoon failures during the turn of the century, the “Dust Bowl” droughts and extreme heat waves in North America in the 1930s, the World War II period drought in Australia between 1937 and 1945; and the European droughts and heat waves of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

“Understanding the mechanisms involved in these events, and their links to large scale forcing is an important test for our understanding of modern climate change and for predicting impacts of future change,” they wrote.

On her blog, Climate, Etc., Curry added some interesting observations, noting that in 1910 the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has been estimated to be 300.1 parts per million; in 1950 it was only 311.3 ppm; and in 2018 it is 408 ppm. 

“So, the warming during the period 1910-1945 was associated with a CO2 increase of 10 ppm, whereas a comparable amount of warming during the period 1950 to 2018 was associated with a 97 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration — almost an order of magnitude greater CO2 increase for a comparable amount of global ocean warming,” Curry wrote. “ … Clearly, there were other factors in play besides CO2 emissions in the early 20th century global warming.”

In other words, the earth was warming long before the mass industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, as Watts observed, and then there was a lack of warming, and actual some cooling, between 1945 and 1975.

All that needs to be explained, Curry wrote.

“Much more effort is needed to understand not only the early 20th century warming, but also the ‘grand hiatus’ from 1945-1975,” she wrote. “Attempting to attribute these features to aerosol (stratospheric or pollution) forcing haven’t gotten us very far.”

And once those are explained, Curry wrote, then science needs to tackle the 19th century — overall warming, with global sea level rise initiating about 1860, and glacier melt initiating about 1850. 

“And then we need to tackle the last 800 years — the Little Ice Age and the ‘recovery,’” she wrote. 

In the meantime, heat waves need to be taken with a dose of air conditioning.

“Until all this is sorted out, we do not have a strong basis for attributing anything close to ~100 percent of the warming since 1950 to humans, or for making credible projections of 21st century climate change,” she concluded.

Bias continues

Meanwhile, the study from last year cited by Watts asserts that the bias in the temperature reports are real, with approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change failing to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.

The research show that most 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, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States,” the report concluded.

“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.,” Watts said when the report was released. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”

NOAA’s “Requirements and Standards for [National Weather Service] Climate Observations” instructs that temperature data instruments must be “over level terrain (earth or sod) typical of the area around the station and at least 100 feet from any extensive concrete or paved surface.” They also state that “all attempts will be made to avoid areas where rough terrain or air drainage are proven to result in non-representative temperature data.” 

The new report shows that instruction is regularly violated.

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.