Last year humanity lived through the hottest 12 months in at least 125,000 years, reported an hysterical CNN, a frame of mind replicated throughout much of the mainstream media. Scientists have compared 2023’s “climate change fallout” to a “disaster movie”, added the U.S. cable news channel. All poppycock, needless to say, with a political Net Zero motive, and little if any scientific evidence to back it up. Accurate temperature records barely started before the 20th century, and recent measurements by fixed thermometers have been heavily corrupted by growing urban heat. It is in fact possible using proxy measurements to get a good idea of general temperature movements over the last 125,000 years. All the evidence points to periods of much higher temperatures, notably between 10,000 to 5,000 years ago. The latest science paper examining this trend has just been published, and it points to summer temperatures at least 1.5°C higher around 5,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean, at a time when civilisation was developing rapidly.
It is not the only paper recently published that suggests there were much higher temperatures periods in the recent past. The science blog No Tricks Zone reports that Arctic regions with at least six months of current sea ice coverage were ice free nearly all year round between 9,000 to 5,000 years ago, and 2°C warmer than today. Furthermore it was found that temperatures were 7-8°C warmer 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. During the early Holocene from 10,000 years ago it was so warm that boreal forests expanded northward to Arctic regions that are today too cold to support anything other than tundra. Polar bears not only survived without sea ice during the warmer Holocene, but also the much hotter periods over 100,000 years ago. These two papers attest to much warmer periods over the last 125,000 years, and further examples covered in the Daily Sceptic can be found here.
Against this weight of scientific evidence, it is simply incorrect, in fact grossly misleading, to suggest temperatures are at an all-time 125,000-year high. But of course scientific credibility has nothing to do with the relentless campaign of weather catastrophising that is pushing the collectivist Net Zero agenda. Nothing must disturb the set ‘global boiling’ narrative. Few mainstream media outlets, for instance, are likely to report on just released figures from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre, that revealed Arctic sea ice in December 2023 recorded its third highest gain in the 45-year record.
An interesting article was published yesterday in the Conservative Women written by the distinguished medical scientist Professor Angus Dalgleish. Having been a Covid sceptic, he noted that he has recently been delving into climate change. Two words sprang to his mind, “specious and sophistry”. In his view, “the worldwide rush to Net Zero is entirely based on (yes, you guessed it) useless computer models and simulations which have been heavily doctored to give the required answer. Past data have been homogenised to make it look as if recent climate change is something to do with man-made CO2 production, when the available raw data show no recent correlation at all and complete ignorance of the fact that rising CO2 levels tend to follow temperature change and not cause it”.
Emotion drives much of mainstream media climate reporting these days. The doomsday sandwich board is standard issue in most newsrooms. “These are temperatures we should not be experiencing,” says Andrew Pershing from Climate Central, quoted by CNN. The “vast majority” of humanity was affected by unusual high heat in 2023, with 7.3 billion people experiencing “at least 10 days of high temperatures with very strong climate fingerprints”. Note how meaningless, unfalsifiable numbers are picked and an immediate unscientific connection is made to long-term changes in the climate. Climate Central specialises in ready-to-publish climate catastrophe media copy, and is funded by a small group of green billionaire foundations.
Lack of any historical perspective is also commonplace. The CNN article quoted Geography Professor Hannah Cloke who said we are “already” seeing more violent storms, heavier rains and floods and more intense, frequent and longer heat waves, droughts and wildfires. Alas little of this is backed up by scientific data, where in reality there is hardly any indication that extreme weather and its impacts are getting much worse.
But when was the climate perfect, asks the science writer Roger Pielke Jnr. in a recent blog post. Climate activists claim that every increment of warming over the pre-industrial baseline of 1850-1900 results in more harm to people and the planet. Pielke notes that this baseline serves as a “climate utopia” since almost nobody has an idea what the climate looked like back then, much less the climate impacts actually experienced. But researchers can piece together some dramatic events particularly in a strong El Niño year, currently being experienced at present, and very powerful in 1877-88. This period saw horrendous drought and famine to add to other major catastrophes around this time. The great U.S. midwestern fires of 1871 killed as many as 2,400 people, and other events were the 1872 Baltic Sea flood, an 1875 midwestern locust swarm of an estimated 12.5 trillion insects, the 1878 China typhoon that killed as many as 100,000 people, and the six major landfall hurricanes in the 1870s, compared with three in the 2010s.
Pielke provides the above graph which shows the dramatic fall in estimated deaths caused by extreme weather since the 1870s. Caution is advised since the estimates are uncertain, although he notes the 1870s and 1920s numbers are certainly under-estimates. While not precise figures, they provide orders of magnitude guidance.
One can only imagine the hysterical and feverish weather speculations of imaginative modern climate journalists if they were plying their trade back in Victorian times. Of one thing you can be certain – human sin would invariably be blamed for upsetting Mother Nature.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Been analysing the climate fraud since 2000. Was told as a young’un there was an Ice Age arriving. Still waiting.
‘One can only imagine the hysterical and feverish weather speculations of imaginative modern climate journalists if they were plying their trade back in Victorian times.’
That is what they are – charlatans, quacks and yes criminals. No different than a Jenner, a Pasteur, a Koch or any other sophist and reality-twister.
Climate Bollocks is a U$ 1 Trillion or more industry p.a. Follow that money – and you will find the fake science, the garbage models, the garbage code, the junk databases and data sources.
Note: Climate is the perfect casus belli for some sort of Federated World Govt. Rona/Health is the other theme they are pushing to accomplish the same.
1-One simple proof it is all a fraud is climategate. None of the models, code, data sets are shared or ‘open science’ or reviewed by people like me – IT SMEs. The reason is obvious – fraud. You can’t model many:many relationships you don’t understand.
2-Another factor as the article states – temp records date back to 1880 and the globe is largely uncovered by measurement sites. So the whole thesis is bogus based on incomplete and largely irrelevant data which is subject to endless revisions. See Mann et al.
3-They also ignore the most important elements in our climate – the oceans, clouds and the Sun.
Climate Bollock = Scientism, not science.
Thankyou for your refreshing wisdom
Yes good comment. —But ofcourse we are actually in an Ice Age. It is called the Quaternary. We are in what is known as an Interglacial at the moment called the Holocene, but the ice age conditions will return in the next thousand to two thousand years as happens in all ice ages. ——-It is funny to think of a scenario where these Net Zero Politicians suddenly realise that perhaps they need more CO2 rather than less when this happens and seeing them scramble about trying to open as many coal and gas fired plants as possible.
One doesn’t have to go back to Victorian times. I have recently been reading about the great Mississippi flood of 1927, when 27,000 square miles of land were underwater and 500 died. Just imagine if that happened now? Or the floods here in the UK in summer 2007. Similar things will always happen again, somewhere in the world, and I find it so infuriating that any weather related story now comes with the obligatory spiel about ‘climate change’.
Btw, last summer, here at least, was dreadful, cool and wet. Do people really have such short memories? I suspect the majority just parrot what they read about temperatures without much thought.
Yes. When everything that happens is due to your theory and none of what you say can be falsified, then you are not dealing in “science”. ——-Which is basically what is happening in the highly politicised issue of climate change.
Even the headline is a problem for warmists. How many ICE cars snd gas boilers were emitting CO2 125,000 years ago.
do they know something about advanced life then which they have not told us.
The most populated country on earth is now at the verge, yes the very edge…brink of survivability!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/06/india/extreme-heat-india-climate-ac-intl-hnk/index.html
It is all well and good for an article like this to appear on The Daily Sceptic. I do not know how many people subscribe here, but clearly it won’t be anything near the numbers MSM get. The Challenge is to somehow get this kind of information and perspective onto mainstream television. I remember back in 2007 when Martin Durkins “The Great Global Warming Swindle” appeared on Channel 4. ——Firstly it showed people that what they had been hearing everyday on their 6 O’clock News, was not the only point of view on this issue. They could see respected people, experts in their field criticising the IPCC and showed how the climate issue had become highly politicised with the current orthodoxy challenged. This ofcourse caused spitting fury and outrage among those determined that there was only one acceptable point of view. The program was putting at risk the ambition for planetary governance, because if CO2 was not really driving climate in the way “official science” was claiming then there was really no need for expensive transition away from reliable affordable energy to unreliable unaffordable energy. ——-What I have noticed having investigated this climate change issue for a very long time is that people can become bogged down in arguments about “science” or something they think is really only about “science”, when infact it is a political, economic and social issue as well. This idea that we “listen to the scientists” or “all scientists agree” is NOT how science works. It is how politics work.——- Mike Hulme in a new book called “Climate isn’t everything” explains how the ideology of “Climatism” has become the settled belief that the explanation for all social, economic , ethical and environmental problems is changes to climate caused by human activity. That all problems of the world can easily be solved if we only halt human caused climate change. ———This has really little to do with science. So arguing all day about science is futile. It is politics not science. It is ideology not science. The truth is that there are no experts or scientists who know what the climate is going to do in 50 or 100 years, and that climate models full of speculation and assumption are NOT science. I want the public to be presented with this perspective on mainstream television because if not, then they will continue to be brainwashed and manipulated into accepting damaging policies like Net Zero while thinking they are following “the science”
So even they are saying that it was warmer 125,000 years ago.
I did this exercise to try and explain the data in a format that was hopefully more understandable, I will say some figures will probably be not correct but it is the essence that counts.
Imagine that the atmosphere is £1,000,000, CO2 at 250ppm would be £250, with human contribution at 4% would offer £10 as a gross human contribution, of this 0.7% is the approximate value of the UK contribution,= 7p insignificance as a term, comes to mind
The flaw with your argument is that nature is both an emitter (oceans, volcanoes) and absorber (trees, oceans) of CO2, whereas man is just an emitter (fossil fuels).
So, to argue that man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 is only 4% may well be true when compared with nature’s gross emissions in a year, it is logically much higher when compared with nature’s net emissions. Atmospheric CO2 has increased from around 280 ppm in 1850 to around 410 ppm now. If nature’s emissions / absorptions have broadly netted out over that period (I don’t know if they have), then 100% of the increase is due to man.
By the way, I don’t at all buy the climate crisis narrative or indeed the greenhouse effect as a significant factor in affecting climate.
The more CO2 there is, the more plants grow.
Where the CO2 comes from is irrelevant.
The headline is false. There is credible scientific evidence that the last 12 months were the hottest for 125,000 years – although it is by no means certain.
Most of the last 125,000 years has been an ice age and so is clearly colder than last year. Really the only period that might rival last year was the period 5-9,000 years ago. The papers Chris refers to do not address global temperatures that time. They only look at specific locations. It is recognised that parts of the Northern hemisphere were warmer but this was balanced by cooler temperatures elsewhere. This article contains a number of references. It is obviously difficult to know for certain what global temperatures were many thousands of years ago but there is evidence that they were not as high as the year we have just had.
Whether the temperature was higher or not is just more noise to the narrative. We were warned a couple of years ago that this could happen as a result in the 10-12 cubic kilometres of water and debris being hurtled into the atmosphere from a sub sea volcano in the Pacific. It was indicated at the time that this eruption would distort the world climate for about 5 years before settling. The distortion was indicated as slightly higher temperatures and a rise in rain fall; worldwide.
I expect we will see a lot more doom mongering to come, as it has to meet the political narrative not discussion.
What is a global temperature?——– Today they use Global Temperature Anomaly, which is not the same thing. You cannot get a Global Temperature Anomaly from proxy temperature records taken from individual places long ago. ——-All you can have is proxies from different things like tree rings, sediments, ice cores etc. But ice cores cannot give you a global temperature as you seem to be requiring. It can only give you a proxy from where the ice is, which is in a polar region. ——-The temperature record is very unreliable. Claiming that we now are in the warmest period in the last 125,00 years and that humans are to blame for that stinks of ideology and political agenda’s. ——–PS Just because something might be warmer says nothing about what caused that warming
As you rightly say, it is by no means certain. So the headline was hyperbole to get attention; not conclusively backed by the evidence; agenda driven.
I think your reference makes that clear, doesn’t it?
‘The Holocene Climate Optimum warm event….in terms of the global average, temperatures were probably warmer than now (depending on estimates of latitude dependence and seasonality in response patterns). While temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer than average during the summers, the Tropics and parts of the Southern Hemisphere were colder than average.’
What we think we know now, however, is ‘that, in the last 100 million years, global temperatures have peaked twice. One spike was the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse roughly 92 million years ago, about 25 million years before Earth’s last dinosaurs went extinct. Widespread volcanic activity may have boosted atmospheric carbon dioxide. Temperatures were so high that champsosaurs (crocodile-like reptiles) lived as far north as the Canadian Arctic, and warm-temperature forests thrived near the South Pole.
Another hothouse period was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 55-56 million years ago. Though not quite as hot as the Cretaceous hothouse, the PETM brought rapidly rising temperatures. During much of the Paleocene and early Eocene, the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle.’
What’s the hottest Earth’s ever been? Smithsonian Institution Nov. 2023
‘According to a reconstruction of the Earth’s temperature of the last 4 billion years, Earth is now in one of the coldest periods in its history. No geological period has been as cold as our current geologic period, the Quaternary, for at least 250 million years. Temperature variations of more than 10°C (18°F) in either direction have been common. Viewed in the context of millions of years of Earth history, our recent increase of 0.8°C (1.4°F) appears minuscule. It barely registers as a blip……’
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
The point is that ‘melting glaciers and rising sea levels are the direct result of warming. But the evidence shows that the global warming causing the rise in sea levels and the retreat of the glaciers began long before any significant man-made CO2 increases could have influenced either. Both are directly the result of the natural warming that began in the late 17th-century.’
https://psmsl.org/products/reconstructions/2008GL033611.pdf
As I have pointed out many times before, temperatures from tens of millions years ago are irrelevant. They are talking about immense changes over timescales which do not concern us where factors such as the strength of the sun and continental drift come into play.
it is true that Antarctic ice cores suggest that on a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years CO2 levels lagged temperature change. This is widely accepted by climate scientists. Various events such as Milankovitch cycles initiated temperature changes which were then sustained and amplified by the resulting change in CO2 levels. The difference this time is we are causing the rise in CO2 and it is very fast.
This video clip, showing a panel of climate scientists, suggests that during the last 10,000 years the Earth has been warmer than now 90% of the time – and the same applies over the 4.6 billion years of the Earth’s existence.
https://youtu.be/mqejXs7XgsU
Ask him wat the global temperature was in 1800. ——Then 1600——Then 1400———then 1200—-then 600. ———-They seem to think they know that the “Global Temperature” is hotter now than everywhere in the past 125,000 years but remarkably they cannot tell you what the “global temperature” was 200 or 600 years ago. ——-They have a temperature fetish.
Actually it is not clear they are climate scientists. There was no introduction and the reference to the climate being warmer over the last 4.6 billion years shows an alarming lack of understanding of climate science (it is true but utterly irrelevant). The same with the reference to CO2 levels in the room. The assertion that the earth has been warmer than the present 95% of the time over the last 10,000 years flies in the face of most accounts and no evidence is provided.
What is a “climate scientist”? There really isn’t such a thing——- There is NO ONE who knows all about climate. There isn’t even theory of climate. Climate is poorly understood. No one knows what the climate will be doing in 50 years time and neither do you. Perhaps if we tried to learn about “climate” instead of “climate change” we might actually get somewhere. But there is no money in that is there? All the government money goes to “climate change”. ——–Governments ae not interested in “climate”, because there is no political capital in understanding it.
The one thing constant about temperature is that it is never constant, rising and falling no matter what time scale observed,
10,000 years of temperature changes since the end of the last ice age confirms this truism. Quite large temperature swings took place over this period, much greater than what has been observed in the last 150 or so years. Each one of those moves up or down were caused entirely by natural forces.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/paleoclimatology/ice-core
The beginning of the modern increase in CO2 emissions began in the post-WW II industrial boom. That rise in CO2 was accompanied by a significant 33-year span of global cooling from 1944–1976.
https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/portals/CDIAC
‘…sustained and amplified by the resulting change in CO2 levels.’
So prove it…….
The significance of your assertion may very well imply the implosion of the global economy.
Be aware.
‘What surprised us is that we hadn’t really thought through the economic impact’
Melinda Gates (on the lockdown experiment)
Nothing in your ‘reference’ from an encyclopedia backs up your assertion.
An assertion without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.
You and I are always to disprove what these people cannot prove in the first place and if we cannot do that they have decided everything they say must be true.
As soon as the question of proof re the precise link between industry generated CO2 and warming levels is asked…….cue tumbleweed.
‘Melting glaciers and rising sea levels are the direct result of warming. The evidence shows that the global warming causing the rise in sea levels and the retreat of the glaciers began long before any significant man-made CO2 increases could have influenced either.’
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1107046
The reason that the neo-nihilists struggle with this is:
‘CO2 becomes a less effective greenhouse gas at higher concentrations because of what is often called “saturation.” Each additional 100 ppm increase of CO2 in the atmosphere causes a smaller and smaller change in “radiative forcing,” or in temperature.’
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341997882_Dependence_of_Earth's_Thermal_Radiation_on_Five_Most_Abundant_Greenhouse_Gases June 2020
None of the climate change scam is backed by any evidence scientific or otherwise, like the CoVid scam.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/04/climate-fact-check-december-2023/
Beyond bollocks.
“climate fingerprints” eh? That’s a new one. Can anybody enlighten me?
Actually the IPPC have recently said they see “no human signal” in the data. They cannot tell the difference between warming allegedly caused by humans and warming that might be natural. ——–So the climate crisis really only exists in one place. —–Models.
Climate change all lies no evidence
CNN? I bet both of their viewers were mortified. Go tell it to the fairies.