I found a fascinating article on the Fox News website (yes, I do read these things occasionally, if only to see what the "other side" is up to) entitled "It's not climate change that's causing heat waves this summer but no-one wants to explain why".
It purports to explain that heat waves in the USA are not really getting worse (try explaining that to the residents of Phoenix, Arizona!), and that "there's no reason to believe that these weather events are evidence that the world is hurtling towards a climate change catastrophe". It calls the current "left-wing" news coverage "sloppy, irresponsible media reorting, combined with cherry-picked data".
The article concludes that: "The ugly truth behind climate alarmism is that much of it is driven by a radical ideological agenda that is seeking to transform the global economy and American society, not by facts. The best way to fight back against it is to use cold hard facts. And those facts plainly show that there is no reason to panic about our ever-changing climate."
The article, incidentally, is by one Justin Haskins, whom I'd never heard of, but who is apparently the director of the Socialism Research Center at the Heartland Institute (and you can guess what they do!) and a New York Times bestselling author. Well, who knew.
Anyway, the one "cold hard fact" that Haskins presents to support his theory is a graph of the US Annual Heat Wave Index 1895-2021, which (below) shows, rather strikingly, a huge peak of heat waves in the 1930s, orders of magnitude worse than the recent historical record.
Haskins says the figure comes from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), although when I looked for it, I found other EPA figures showing a gradual increase in heat wave frequency, duration, season length and intensity, all since the 1960s (when record-keeping became more reliable). All also quite striking, but not in accordance with Haskins' theory.
I did eventually find a version of Haskins' figure, however, on the Statista website, and it does indeed show a huge spike in heat waves in the USA in the 1930s, unparalleled by anything before or since. Interestingly, the EPA webpage referenced earlier specifically addresses this phenonenon. The spike, it says, "reflects extreme, persistent heat waves in the Great Plains region during a period known as the 'Dust Bowl'. Poor land use practices and many years of intense drought contributed to these heat waves by depleting soil moisture and reducing the moderating effects of evaporation."
So, to use the 1930s as the sole refuting factor of the otherwise clear trends shown by every other metric would seem the ultimate in the kind of agenda-driven "cherry-picked data" that Haskins claims to abhor so much.
The fact that we are living through the hottest month ever (at least in the last 100,000 years)? Who cares? Following on from the hottest ever June? So? That the ten hottest years ever all occurred in the last 13 years? Pshaw! That the Mediterranean and North Atlantic have recorded record high temperatures two months before the usual high temperature mark? Irrelevant! That the four hottest days ever, globally, all occurred this month? Cherry-picking!
Now, I know, you don't go to Fox News for the latest in science-based evidence. But it's interesting that the other "radical ideological agenda" is using a more scientific approach - albeit a flawed one - to support its "climate change hoax" narrative.
UPDATE
Whatever tbe figures and graphs say, this extraordinary collection of photos from the BBC shows explicitly the human suffering worldwide during this exceptional month of July 2023.
No comments:
Post a Comment