It is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and America’s mainstream media once again are blaming summer heat waves on anthropogenic global warming. Are they right?

We recognize that climate changes, because climate always changes. Characteristics of one year may make it warmer, or cooler, than other years.

This year, we are experiencing our third consecutive year of La Niña—a substantial cooling of waters in the central Pacific Ocean due, in part, to an increase in winds across the tropical Pacific. This creates changes in upper atmospheric weather patterns that affect the United States. This year is the strongest La Niña of the recent, and rare, three-year pattern (which has happened only twice before since 1950).

According to Joe D’Aleo of Weatherbell, strong La Niña events cause hot and dry conditions across the central United States and into the Eastern Seaboard. This is what we are experiencing, and scientists know exactly why.

Despite the heat, we are not experiencing the warmest period in all of human history—or even in the last century. The accompanying graph from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—not exactly known for “climate denialism”—shows that the U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index was five times higher in the 1930s (i.e., the Dust Bowl era) than at any time between 1895 and 2020 (https://bit.ly/3zfjNCb)

Not surprisingly, EPA hides this by featuring on the main page other graphs that start in the 1960s, the coolest decade, and focus on urban areas, increasingly affected by urban heat islands as their populations rose, thus giving the false impression that the last two decades have seen the most and highest heat waves. Using data from the US Global Change Research Program (which I briefly headed), the index describes trends in multi-day extreme heat events across the contiguous 48 states. Over the last eighty years (i.e., the post-Dust Bowl era), no trend exists.

Green activists, politicians, bureaucrats like those at the EPA, and the media keep the public in the dark about such things.

What can science say about our current heat? What caused it? Summer. It will diminish as autumn sets in.

Bridging Humanity and the Environment is the blog of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, the premier Christian think tank addressing Biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the gospel of Christ all tied together. Would you like to help us publish more such articles and other educational resources? Because we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, all gifts are tax-deductible.