Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy
Cherrypicking media alarmists select a short time window and go from there. But compared to most of Earth’s history, temperatures in 2023 are unusually cold. Modern warming is by no means unique – other similar periods in recent millennia, and sometimes much longer ones in the more distant past, are known to have occurred.
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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, says Breitbart.
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.
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 goes back only 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 [here], the earth has been much hotter for most of the past 500 million years.
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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.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
I’ll start worrying when I get buzzed by a dragonfly with a 3ft wingspan.
Don’t blame me: it’s RAINING & COLD outside this now.
So WHEN & WHERE is this summer they are talking about. WHEN as in the exact time period, and why, WHY THAT period, and WHERE was it recorded, WHY THERE? and not Here. Here around my home area and ANY TIME since February this year or other year , for all that? We can get all seasons on 1 day up to around 10th June. and come September end, likewise. June to September can be / see anything you want. ( There’s a thought out statement). THe Sun comes and goes regularly, unlike the last pay day Thursday of the month so is a better measure for startpoints.
One man’s Meat is another man’s poison, so the summer comes and goes – each dog has it’s day.
Was watching a Prog on Satellite this morning – Serengeti Life… and KEY Creatures to the development of regions of the Earth: Wildebeest in Serengeti, A Spider somewhere lse, a Fish in Canadian Lakes clearing the Algal waters, etc. … so what’s the big deal other than to control the uncontrollable.
The current warm period is the eighth known cycle, the first I cannot remember its name but from the 2nd, the Egyptian around 1000BC, then the Roman peak around AD0200, the Well Known Medieval Warm Period around 900 when the Vikings settled Greenland but were forced to leave around 1400 when it got too cold as it got to 1800 which seems to be the start of the present cycle. A guess might be that the present warm period will peak in around 50 to 200 years.
The cycles seem to vary between 600 and 1000 years.
The thesis is that these cycles are driven by the sun orbits sunspot activity causing disturbance of the earth’s magnetic field causing more and fewer cosmic rays varying the number of clouds and so the earth temperature.
See Kauppenin @ Turku and Mark Svenmark also Kobe Uni.
Antarctica notes – NSIDC says…
…the Antarctic Ice Sheet covers almost 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), roughly the area of the contiguous United States and Mexico combined. The Antarctic Ice Sheet measures nearly 4.9 kilometers (3 miles) at its thickest point and contains about 30 million cubic kilometers (7.2 million cubic miles) of ice. If the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, sea level would rise about 60 meters (200 feet). [bold added]
https://nsidc.org/learn/parts-cryosphere/ice-sheets/ice-sheet-quick-facts
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Doesn’t sound much like a fiercely hot planet. Then there’s Greenland as well.
It is just words that they are using to scare the people so they can extort more funding from us. According to my weather station records this is not the hottest summer evah – it has been warmer in the past so I assume they are using temperature measuring at the ends of runways again to record the temp of jet exhausts which is meaningless.
[…] Posted on September 11, 2023 by HiFast Fact Check: Is This the Hottest Summer on Earth? – in short, far from it […]
As far as I can tell, this is utter garbage, based on max-min averages being smeared across vast areas that didn’t experience those temperatures. Certainly last summer was warmer overall in SW France and dryer, as the colour of the grass and plants around here demonstrates clearly. But if you go on anomalies versus averages and use shirt peaks, no doubt it wasn’t.
To be fair it was quite warm yesterday and a couple of days before that. In fact it was the hottest Sunday since my records began; last Monday.