Lie to me once, shame on you, lie to me twice, shame on me. It is an old saying and puts accountability on the gullible that continue to believe a liar. Many remember Climategate 2009 when climate “scientists” emails were leaked showing them covering up and hiding data that did not support the preferred man-caused-global-warming (MCGW) narrative. Data was chosen or hidden to support the preferred narrative. Recent headlines are “July 4 Breaks Record for the Hottest Day Ever – 1 Day After the Previous Record Was Broken” followed by “Tuesday appears to have been the hottest day ever recorded on Earth – and it broke the record set just one day before”. In short, be afraid, the earth is on fire, and it is getting worse fast! If this were true, records would be shattered all over the world, but that is not the case.
Little has changed after another year of global warming headlines. Maine’s record high temperature of 105°F, set on July 10, 1911, is now one hundred and twelve years old. Twelve Maine towns and cities have high temperature records of 100 degrees and above. Six of the records were set in 1975, the remaining six were set in 1897, 1911, 1911, 1935, 1955, and 1988. Until recently the Maine.gov website stated the “record hottest year in Maine” was 1913 and the “record coldest year in Maine” was 1904. Although that inconvenient fact has been purged from the Maine web site, it is still true.
The U.S. data is like Maine’s. Three states set an all-time-record-high in the 1800s. In the following three decades ending in 1929, another ten states set their record. In the 1930s, by far the hottest decade, twenty-three states were added. In the following three decades ending in 1969 three more states were added. In the three decades ending in 1999, another eight states were added. Only three states have set high records in this century. To put it into perspective 39 states (78%) have records well over 50 years old. Texas, a state currently in the headlines set its high of 120°F in 1936 in a heatwave that was credited for killing 5000 people across the US.
The temperature record of Planet Earth also does not show a dramatic trend. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), divides the world into 11 regions for recording “highest temperature.” The following is a list of the dates of those records; 1931, 2017, 1905, 1913, 1960, 1942, 1977, 1982, 2020, 1989, and 2020. Five of these records are older than 50 years.
It is important to note that there is a certification process for recognized temperature records. Headlines and stories, for the most part, do not receive any type of review and are unreliable from a scientific standpoint. To those who say, “follow the science”, I would caution them not to confuse headlines and sound bites with science but rather, to “follow the data.” Taken by itself, the data looks unremarkable. WMO and NOOA data were used as sources for this article. The graph is from PlantMaps.com using temperatures from the National Climate Data Center.
Joe Grant, Wiscasset
0 Comments