Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash

Recently headlines in mainstream media such as the BBC, CNN, Forbes, and The Washington Post blared the consistent message that July 4, 2023 was the hottest day in history, or at least in the past 125,000 years. The headlines and stories show just how gullible the media is, or alternatively, that they are so wedded to the climate crisis narrative that they would publish a story they know is impossible to verify and is probably untrue.

The Washington Post’s (WP) story was typical of the foolish claims in the mainstream media, “This July 4 was hot. Earth’s hottest day on record, in fact.” What the WP presented as a “fact” was nothing more than computer model speculation based on a wide variety of disparate types of data from satellite measurements to surface data, etc., blended and reanalyzed to produce an alarming but unsubstantiated result. Although the WP claimed the data was from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction, it wasn’t. The WP’s claims, as with those made in the headlines and alarming stories in other so-called news outlets, came from a single source: the “Climate Reanalyzer” at the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine (UM).

UM’s Climate Reanalyzer is not an official U.S. government source of data and does not produce original data. Instead, it manipulates and reframes data from other sources. Had the WP or other mainstream media outlets bothered to check with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about the claims of record-setting heat, they would have found the agency said surface temperature data does not confirm global high-temperature records were broken in early July.

Still, Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, told the WP with confidence, “It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial.” The WP apparently didn’t even think to question that claim.

In addition to the fact that the idea of a “global average temperature” is a made-up statistic having no real weather or climate meaning, there were no weather satellites even 50 years ago, nor ground-based measuring stations in more than a smattering of locations more than 150 years ago, much less hundreds of thousands of years ago.

“One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago,” wrote Steve Milloy, operator of JunkScience.com, in a Wall Street Journal article. “Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.”

Climate analyst Paul Homewood made a similar point, writing:

The idea that we know the global temperature today is absurd in itself. But the idea that we actually know what it was on a given day 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago, never mind thousands of years ago is sheer fraud.

And the claim that it is hotter now than 5,000 years ago is a total lie—there is abundant evidence that it was much warmer then.

Worse still for the “hottest day ever narrative” is that the measured average temperature on July 4, actually recorded around the world, is much less than claimed. Milloy notes,

A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July.

As Heartland Institute President James Taylor writes in a Climate Realism post on the topic, numerous sources such as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and peer-reviewed research published in the journal Science show historic temperatures have been warmer for long stretches of time since we came out of the last ice age approximately 12,000 years ago, when human civilizations began to form, than they are at present. Taylor writes:

[H]istorical temperatures derived from ice core samples, as reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science … shows the warming of the past 150 [years] leaves current temperatures well below temperatures that have predominated during most of the time period that human civilization has existed. (see the figure below)

The chart below from the IPCC also contradicts the claim that July 4, 2023, or any of the days that followed, established new global temperature records:

I’m not familiar enough with the UM’s Climate Reanalyzer to judge whether it is a useful tool for some purpose or set of purposes beyond generating alarming but false headlines about climate change. In any case, the “data” it generates, if it can be called that, should in no way, shape, or form be taken as authoritative or used in place of actual temperature measurements when presenting local, regional, or global average temperatures.

The mainstream media should be ashamed of itself for hyping yet another big climate lie.

This piece originally appeared at heartlanddailynews.com and has been republished here with permission.