“Unprecedented Heat Wave in Pacific Northwest Driven by Climate Change,” the headline in E&E News, WOWT-TV, WorldNewsNetwork, and other media outlets recently, couldn’t possibly be less scientific. With absolutely no analysis, no historical context, and nothing but conjecture, author Anne C. Mulkern, in her article for Scientific American, eschewed science for advocacy in her coverage of the brief Pacific Northwest (PNW) heat wave at the end of June.

If the temperature records hold up to scrutiny and reanalysis, the heat wave did set some all-time high temperature records in Washington, Oregon, and Canada. But consider this: at best, we have about 150 years of reliable weather records for the PNW, so a “black swan” outlier event like this isn’t surprising. It has happened before, most certainly. We just weren’t around to observe it. After all, Native Americans did not keep written weather records.

High (and low) temperature records are nothing new. Data show us more high temperature records were set during the first half of the twentieth century than during the past 50 years. Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirms this.

Many climate activists immediately pointed to “climate change” as the cause of the recent PNW heat wave, even though the heat dome would have been a record weather event with or without the recent modest warming. It is said “climate change,” aka global warming, added about 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. The recent PNW temperature increase far exceeded that.

The temperatures were so high that the small warming of 2°F of climate change was dwarfed. In cities, the “urban heat island effect” (UHI) was also a bigger cause in this case. Portland and Seattle hit supposed all-time highs of 116 and 108 Monday, while Lytton, Canada surged to a national record of 118.

The EPA reports, “… the heat island effect results in daytime temperatures in urban areas about 1-7°F higher than temperatures in outlying areas.”

The UHI effect is well-known and extensively documented. Many weather stations used to calculate climate values have been compromised by the encroachment of urbanization, as I reported in 2009 with the publication of “Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” and confirmed with an analysis presented in 2015 at the American Geophysical Union convention. When examined, more than 90 percent of the surface stations used by the National Weather Service (NWS) to record surface temperatures and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to plot temperature trends violate the NWS’s standards for reliable measurements, with thermometers not being a minimum of 100 feet away from biasing influences such as artificial sources of heat or impervious surfaces such as concrete which absorb heat during the day only to release it slowly at night. These factors bias measured nighttime low temperatures upward, shifting the daily averages up.

The U.S. Climate Reference Network, a network consisting solely of high-quality, unbiased temperature measuring stations, has shown no sustained increase in daily high temperatures in the United States since it was established in 2005.

The previous all-time record high for Portland was 107. Seattle’s all-time high was 103. Medford, Oregon tied its all-time record of 115 degrees on Monday. It didn’t get hotter there than ever before because Medford was south of the center of the high-pressure dome.

The record-high temperatures for Washington and Oregon have yet to be certified, although the media has trumpeted them as fact. Some of the high-temperature records have already proven to be erroneous because of faulty equipment or observation, according to a Tweet from the National Weather Service.

What I find most interesting is when you examine official statewide maximum temperatures since record keeping began in about 1895, only two out of fifty have occurred in the twenty-first century. Most of the high-temperature records across the nation happened in the first half of the twentieth century. According to government records, Oregon’s record high temperature of 119℉ was recorded twice, both times in 1898, more than 120 years of global warming ago. Washington State’s maximum temperature of 118℉ was recorded first in 1928 and tied in 1961, nearly 100 and 50 years of global warming ago, respectively. Forty states’ record high temperatures were set before 1960, with 25 of the record highs being set or tied in the 1930s alone. New high-temperature records have been set in only two states since 2000, meaning more states’ record highs were recorded in the 1890s than in the first two decades of the current century.

Climate alarmists regularly claim we live in the “hottest decade ever.” The records do not support that claim. The Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s retain the title of hottest decade in recorded history, at a time when carbon dioxide concentrations were approximately 300 parts per million (PPM), far below the approximately 410 PPM today.

It is often said that weather is not climate, which is true. It is particularly true in this case.

The heat wave was entirely a weather pattern issue, not a climate problem. A large high-pressure dome (sometimes called a heat dome) over the PNW is not unheard of, but this one was particularly strong. In fact, it was a result of a perfect storm of weather pattern confluence. Similar unique weather pattern confluences happen each year, causing major blizzards, torrential floods, and tornado outbreaks. That is business as usual for Earth.

High pressure rotates clockwise, causing sinking air, and in the PNW it creates downslope winds, which heat up because the air compresses as it flows down the slope of the Cascade Mountains from east to west towards Portland and Seattle. It is like the infamous Santa Ana winds of Southern California. It’s the same effect as using a bicycle pump to fill a tire. The pump gets warm, not from friction but because the gas (air) is being compressed. Conversely, aerosol cans get colder because gas under pressure is escaping and decompression occurs inside the can. This is known as the Adiabatic process.

Curiously, another record wasn’t trumpeted by the news media. After the heat-dome high pressure moved east, Seattle and Portland saw record rates of cooling. The National Weather Service office in Portland reported a new all-time record cooling.

“Huge cooling Monday evening inland, with temperatures falling from above 100 deg to the 60s/70s. Portland set a new record, with a drop of 52 deg, breaking old record of 48 deg set in Sep 1988. Cooler today, with highs 85 to 93 inland, and 60s on the coast.”

This all-time record cooling didn’t get much press because it goes against the groupthink narrative that “climate change” causes only bad things. Plus, the news media are often fixated on disaster more than good news.

When record heat and record cooling both happen within a 24-hour period, that’s inarguably weather, not climate.

NOAA describes it well, stating, “Weather reflects short-term conditions of the atmosphere while climate is the average daily weather for an extended period of time at a certain location. … Weather can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season.”

Finally, in a hugely ironic twist, Scientific American, the same outlet that claimed the heat wave was driven by “climate change,” confirms what NOAA and I just told you, in a blog post, titled “Don’t Be Fooled: Weather Is Not Climate.”

You can’t have it both ways.

This article was originally published on Heartland.org.