Predictably, the summer is once again heating up much of the Northern Hemisphere. And just as predictably global elites are turning up the heat on global warming, now global boiling. As the Washington Post recently headlined: “The U.N. warns ‘an era of global boiling’ has started.”  

Of course, US officials are on top of this global boiling meme. In early July, The Wall Street Journal reported the news about “The Science Behind Beryl’s Early Fury”: According to the National Weather Service this is “the first time a Category 5 hurricane has formed at this time of year since recordkeeping began in 1851…”. 

However, the obvious question is how can we be sure of that claim since only relatively crude, incomplete observations were made many decades prior to the satellite era? For nearly 100 years of recordkeeping, from the 1850s to the mid-1940s, hurricane location and strength was mainly reported by ships and later aircraft with a primary purpose of avoiding life-threatening weather. 

The launching of satellites in the late 1950s greatly improved hurricane tracking. Today detailed analysis via geostationary and polar orbiting satellites is routine. 

Similar claims of the hottest surface temperatures ever on record are made regularly for various locations across the US. But, as noted in meteorologist Brian Sussman’s new book Climate Cult, 20 states registered record maximum temperatures of at least 109 degrees Fahrenheit, all occurring in the 1930s, a decade that also contained the infamous Dust-Bowl years. 

Yet a June New York Times article on the “not normal” summer heat conveniently displayed a graph with temperature trends beginning in the 1940s.  

Fortunately for much of main-stream media that pushes a climate-disaster agenda, the public can be easily duped when temperatures are extra hot and knowledge of the climate record is extra low.  

Standard statistical ploys using incomplete datasets or cherry-picked values are circulated on not just temperature levels, but also severe weather frequency and intensity, sea level fluctuations, and ice cap extents. 

In addition to Sussman’s Climate Cult book, many recent books have been published that provide much needed perspective on the stock climate change claims. Examples include physicist Steven Koonin’s book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (BenBella, 2021) and Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism by historian E. Calvin Beisner and climatologist David Legates (Regnery, 2023). (By the way, I have reviews for each of these excellent books in the Washington Times.) 

Numerous politicians take advantage of a constituency that “trusts the science,” even if the public does not realize that the science is saturated with politics. And politicians disseminate their message through expert storytellers in the media who may not know they are distributing more political science than solid atmospheric science on the climate change issue. 

In 2019, a new organization, Covering Climate Now (CCNow), emerged. According to the CCNow website, the outfit “supports, convenes, and trains journalists and newsrooms to produce rigorous climate coverage that engages audiences.” CCNow avers “hundreds of partner news outlets from over 60 countries reaching billions of people….” 

CCNow was co-founded by “Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine in association with the Guardian and WNYC [and] invites journalists everywhere to transform how [the] profession covers the defining story of our time. Unless news outlets around the world dramatically improve and expand their climate coverage, there simply will not be the public awareness and political will needed to tackle the crisis.” 

Considering that The Nation and the Guardian are intimately connected to CCNow, there is a good chance that climate narratives will be substantially slanted to the political left. And the left has a good track record on spinning up climate catastrophes from unusual weather events. 

The storyline formula appears to be: find a serious weather event; figure out what’s unique about that event; claim human culpability for the event; then, go to press with a tale of weather woe. 

So, when swamped with messages that claim higher than average temperatures and crazy weather are the result of living comfortably, check out the statistics from complete, unbiased climatological data sets and read trustworthy contrarian publications before you succumb to the heat of political-science rhetoric. 

Anthony J. Sadar is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and an adjunct associate professor of science at Geneva College, Beaver Falls, PA. He is also co-author of Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry (CRC Press). 

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