Top climate scientists rubbish claims July was the hottest month ever
Two of America's top climate scientists say July wasn’t the hottest month in the last 100 years let alone in 120,000 years.
Two of America’s top climate scientists have rubbished claims July was the hottest month on record, deploring a “stunning amount of exaggeration and hype” surrounding the UN Secretary-General’s statement last week that “the era of global boiling [had] arrived.”
Cliff Mass, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington, said the public was being “misinformed on a massive scale” following a deluge of news reports that summer heatwaves in the US and Europe had pushed July’s average temperature above 17 degrees, and allegedly to the highest level in 120,000 years. UN
“It‘s terrible. I think it’s a disaster. There’s a stunning amount of exaggeration and hype of extreme weather and heatwaves, and it’s very counter-productive,” he told The Australian in an interview.
“I’m not a contrarian. I‘m pretty mainstream in a very large [academic] department, and I think most of these claims are unfounded and problematic”.
John Christy, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century were at least as intense as those of more recent decades based on consistent, long-term weather stations going back over a century.
“I haven‘t seen anything yet this summer that’s an all time record for these long term stations, 1936 still holds by far the record for the most number of stations with the hottest ever temperatures,” he told The Australian, referring to the year of a great heatwave in North America that killed thousands.
Professor Christy said an explosion of the number of weather stations in the US and around the world had made historical comparisons difficult because some stations only went back a few years; meanwhile, creeping urbanisation had subjected existing weather stations to additional heat.
“In Houston, for example, in the centre it is now between 6 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding countryside,” he explained in an interview with The Australian.
Major newspapers from the Washington Post to the London Times have reported July as the hottest month on record after the average global daily temperature last month surpassed 17 C – around 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels – based on satellite data compiled by the University of Maine.
“We’re just really starting to see climate change kick in,” Nathan Lenssen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, told the Washington Post last month.
Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at Leipzig University, told the Times that July was “outrageously warm” and may have been the warmest month since the Eemian interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago.
Growing concern about higher temperatures caused by humans has underpinned a global push to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 by phasing out fossil fuels in favour of solar and wind power, fuelling major political and scientific debates.
“Hot enough for you? Thank a MAGA Republican. Or better yet, vote them out of office,” tweeted former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last week.
The IMF cancelled a scheduled talk by Nobel prize winner John Clauser last week after he publicly stated: “I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis, and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”
Professor Christy, conceding a slight warming trend over the last 45 years, said July could be the warmest month on record based on global temperatures measured by satellites – “just edging out 1998” – but such measures only went back to 1979.
Professor Mass said the climate was “radically warmer” around 1000 years ago during what’s known as the Medieval Warm Period, when agriculture thrived in parts of now ice-covered Greenland.
“If you really go back far enough there were swamps near the North Pole, and the other thing to keep in mind is that we‘re coming out of a cold period, a Little Ice Age from roughly 1600 to 1850”.
“Global warming, it‘s a serious issue, but it’s a slow issue, it’s not an existential threat,” he added, suggesting human activities may have added up to one degree Celsius to average temperatures since the 1980s.
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