We’re Having a Heat Wave, a Topical Heat Wave

We’re having a heat wave,

A tropical heat wave,

The temperature’s rising,

It isn’t surprising…

Irving Berlin’s 1933 song seems apropos of our time, except that the current heat wave is more topical than tropical and it has both surprising and unsurprising aspects. The Washington Post headline of last Tuesday, “Extreme weather bakes Europe” is indicative of how topical the heat wave afflicting Europe is, as it inspires a three-alarm fire of incendiary global warming hype. But behind all the hyperbole is a major flaw common to most of the inflamed debate over climate change; namely, that a phenomenon occurring in one part of the globe is taken to be indicative of what is occurring over the entire globe.

That the hottest temperatures ever are being recorded in numerous European countries is not surprising. All so-called global warming “deniers” except the most fanatical agree with the alarmists that the earth is getting warmer.  If the warming was universal and constant, record temperatures would be set every year every place on earth, but such is not the case. Surprisingly, globally this year has been exceptionally cool, cooler than it was seven years ago.* So, while Europe swelters, other parts of the globe must be experiencing cooler than normal temperatures. The lesson here is, “When talking about ‘global’ warming, look at the big picture, what is happening globally, not just in some subregion of Mother Earth.”

If almost all agree the earth is getting warmer, why all the heated debate over climate change? There are three points on which climate scientists disagree: the rate of warming, the cause of the warming, and the consequences of the warming. As to the rate of warming, even global warming believers disagree amongst themselves. Here’s a graph of projected future temperatures based on the most popular climate models:

Source: https://www.therightinsight.org/Climate–Models-vs-Observations

Where the line between global warming alarmism and global warming denial falls is not clear.

Not so long ago, discussions about climate change revolved around what would happen if we didn’t limit the warming by 2100 to no more than 2° C. Now, we are told a tipping point will be reached if the earth warms by more than 1.5° C over preindustrial times (Forget that we’ve already exceeded enough “tipping points” to knock over a cow!). As the earth has already warmed 1.1° C in the last century and a half, the chances of our not surpassing the 1.5° point-of-no-return are slim. Will we (and the polar bears) survive nonetheless, as we have the warming that has already taken place?

As to the causes of the present warming, the favored explanation is that it results from the  burning of fossil fuels and the consequent emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; but there are other explanations out there—from cyclical variations in the sun’s energy output to wobbles in the earth’s axis. Until we understand what caused the Ice Ages, I doubt we will have a definitive explanation for what is causing the current interglacial warming. Time will help in gaining that understanding. In the meantime, scientists should keep an open mind, testing all theories against the data.       

As to the consequences of global warming, the alarmists’ brazen “alarum bells” with their “tale of terror” drown out the skeptics’ mellow “golden bells” whose harmony foretells “a world of happiness” (apologies to Edgar Allan Poe). According to the global warming faithful, record heat waves, 50-year droughts, 100-year floods, and similar catastrophes await us if we do not mend our ways. Positive outcomes from the warming are seldom mentioned. For instance, midst all the scary talk of declining crop yields, how many know the earth is actually getting greener, thanks to the increased amount of carbon in the atmosphere? As each new major hurricane provokes a torrent of fearmongering about hurricanes becoming more frequent and more intense, the most respected authority on the subject, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has “low confidence” (i.e., it’s a coin toss) in “changes in the future frequency of tropical cyclones [hurricanes]“ or “an increase in annual global proportion of Category 4 or 5 tropical cyclones.”   

As with rising temperatures, all (well, almost all) agree that the level of the sea is rising—4 to 8 inches over the last 100 years, according to the IPCC. The global warming faithful heighten the alarm by claiming the rate at which sea level is rising is increasing as the earth warms; but, again, the IPCC offers a more cautious opinion, saying “There is no firm evidence of accelerations in sea level rise during this century” (i.e., the last 100 years). As with the warming, many misinterpret a local phenomenon as applicable globally. If you lived in Norway, you’d say sea level is falling; and, if you lived in the Chesapeake Bay area, you’d say it has risen by much more than 4 to 8 inches.

You’d be wrong in either case, as you would be confounding relative sea level with absolute sea level. In Norway, the land has been rising faster than the sea as the land rebounds from the mile-high layer of ice which weighed it down during the last Ice Age. In the Chesapeake Bay region, the land has been sinking even faster than the sea has been rising. Norwegians can’t do much about their falling sea level other than adapt to it. It’s not clear whether Chesapeakans can do anything about their situation, either. If the subsidence is due to geotectonic shifts, they can’t; if the subsidence is due to the draining of aquifers, they might. It would be futile, and costly from an economic point of view, to limit the tapping of underground water if the Earth, not its human inhabitants, is responsible for the flooding in Annapolis and elsewhere on the Bay. Such considerations should enter into any discussions about mitigating or adapting to the warming that is taking place.    

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* Here are the global temperature anomalies (divergences from the 1901-2000 average) for the first six months of 2015 and 2022:

  Source: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/global-temperature-anomalies/anomalies

UPDATE (7/26/22): In a letter to the President of the United States, two geoscientists at Brown University conveyed their concern over conclusions reached at a conference they hosted on climate change. They warned of “a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind.” They foresaw “lowered food production” and “increased frequency and amplitude of extreme weather anomalies,” and encouraged the president “to prepare the agriculture and industry for possible alternatives and to form reserves.”

The letter is dated December 3, 1972. The scientists were concerned about evidence the earth was cooling, a cooling which, they said, “falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age.” In response, the government convened an ad hoc committee to evaluate “the possible mitigation of glacial climate trends.” Caveat physicus!

(See https://realclimatescience.com/ )