So extreme, they cannot be explained by global warming models!

From the Columbia Climate School and the “have you checked the accuracy and placement of thermometers” and the “weather is not climate” departments comes this new study that is hilarious in it’s lameness. It’s like these people have never heard of weather before, and they only exist in climate headspace. – Anthony

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Earth’s hottest recorded year was 2023, at 2.12 degrees F above the 20th-century average. This surpassed the previous record set in 2016. So far, the 10 hottest yearly average temperatures have occurred in the past decade. And, with the hottest summer and hottest single day, 2024 is on track to set yet another record.

All this may not be breaking news to everyone, but amid this upward march in average temperatures, a striking new phenomenon is emerging: distinct regions are seeing repeated heat waves that are so extreme, they fall far beyond what any model of global warming can predict or explain. A new study provides the first worldwide map of such regions, which show up on every continent except Antarctica like giant, angry skin blotches. In recent years these heat waves have killed tens of thousands of people, withered crops and forests, and sparked devastating wildfires.

“The large and unexpected margins by which recent regional-scale extremes have broken earlier records have raised questions about the degree to which climate models can provide adequate estimates of relations between global mean temperature changes and regional climate risks,” says the study.

“This is about extreme trends that are the outcome of physical interactions we might not completely understand,” said lead author Kai Kornhuber, an adjunct scientist at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “These regions become temporary hothouses.” Kornhuber is also a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

The study was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study looks at heat waves over the past 65 years, identifying areas where extreme heat is accelerating considerably faster than more moderate temperatures. This often results in maximum temperatures that have been repeatedly broken by outsize, sometimes astonishing, amounts. For instance, a nine-day wave that hammered the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 broke daily records in some locales by 30 degrees C, or 54 F. This included the highest ever temperature recorded in Canada, 121.3 F, in Lytton, British Columbia. The town burned to the ground the next day in a wildfire driven in large part by the drying of vegetation in the extraordinary heat. In Oregon and Washington state, hundreds of people died from heat stroke and other health conditions.

These extreme heat waves have been hitting predominantly in the last five years or so, though some occurred in the early 2000s or before. The most hard-hit regions include populous central China, Japan, Korea, the Arabian peninsula, eastern Australia and scattered parts of Africa. Others include Canada’s Northwest Territories and its High Arctic islands, northern Greenland, the southern end of South America and scattered patches of Siberia. Areas of Texas and New Mexico appear on the map, though they are not at the most extreme end.

According to the report, the most intense and consistent signal comes from northwestern Europe, where sequences of heat waves contributed to some 60,000 deaths in 2022 and 47,000 deaths in 2023. These occurred across Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and other countries. Here, in recent years, the hottest days of the year are warming twice as fast the summer mean temperatures. The region is especially vulnerable in part because, unlike places like the United States, few people have air conditioning, because traditionally it was almost never needed. The outbreaks have continued; as recently as this September, new maximum temperature records were set in Austria, France, Hungary, Slovenia, Norway and Sweden.

The researchers call the statistical trends “tail-widening”―that is, the anomalous occurrence of temperatures at the far upper end, or beyond, anything that would be expected with simple upward shifts in mean summer temperatures. But the phenomenon is not happening everywhere; the study shows that maximum temperatures across many other regions are actually lower than what models would predict. These include wide areas of the north-central United States and south-central Canada, interior parts of South America, much of Siberia, northern Africa and northern Australia. Heat is increasing in these regions as well, but the extremes are increasing at similar or lower speed than what changes in average would suggest.

Climbing overall temperatures make heat waves more likely in many cases, but the causes of the extreme heat outbreaks are not entirely clear. In Europe and Russia, an earlier study led by Kornhuber blamed heat waves and droughts on wobbles in the jet stream, a fast-moving river of air that continuously circles the northern hemisphere. Hemmed in by historically frigid temperatures in the far north and much warmer ones further south, the jet stream generally confines itself to a narrow band. But the Arctic is warming on average far more quickly than most other parts of the Earth, and this appears to be destabilizing the jet stream, causing it to develop so-called Rossby waves, which suck hot air from the south and park it in temperate regions that normally do not see extreme heat for days or weeks at a time.

This is only one hypothesis, and it does not seem to explain all the extremes. A study of the fatal 2021 Pacific Northwest/southwestern Canada heat wave led by Lamont-Doherty graduate student Samuel Bartusek (also a coauthor on the latest paper) identified a confluence of factors. Some seemed connected to long-term climate change, others to chance. The study identified a disruption in the jet stream similar to the Rossby waves thought to affect Europe and Russia. It also found that decades of slowly rising temperatures had been drying out regional vegetation, so that when a spell of hot weather came along, plants had fewer reserves of water to evaporate into the air, a process that helps moderate heat. A third factor: a series of smaller-scale atmospheric waves that gathered heat from the Pacific Ocean surface and transported it eastward onto land. Like Europe, few people in this region have air conditioning, because it is generally not needed, and this probably upped the death toll.

The heat wave “was so extreme, it’s tempting to apply the label of a ‘black swan’ event, one that can’t be predicted,” said Bartusek. “But there’s a boundary between the totally unpredictable, the plausible and the totally expected that’s hard to categorize. I would call this more of a grey swan.”

While the wealthy United States is better prepared than many other places, excessive heat nevertheless kills more people than all other weather-related causes combined, including hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. According to a study out this past August, the yearly death rate has more than doubled since 1999, with 2,325 heat-related deaths in 2023. This has recently led to calls for heat waves to be named, similar to hurricanes, in order to heighten public awareness and motivate governments to prepare.

“Due to their unprecedented nature, these heat waves are usually linked to very severe health impacts, and can be disastrous for agriculture, vegetation and infrastructure,” said Kornhuber. “We’re not built for them, and we might not be able to adapt fast enough.”

The study was also coauthored by Richard Seager and Mingfang Ting of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and H.J. Schellnhuber of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

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Guest essay by Chris Talgo originally published at TownHall

For most of my adult life, climate alarmists have ruled the day as they have methodically and successfully injected their relentless fearmongering and bogus science throughout academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and just about every other major, powerful cultural institution. While this has paid giant dividends in recent years, it has also fueled a backlash that we are finally starting to see bubble to the surface.

Let’s begin by briefly recapping how the climate alarmists were able to hypnotize so many people into believing that climate change was an existential crisis—which it is not—in the first place.

At the end of the twentieth century and into the dawn of the twenty-first century, we began to see more and more calls for international bodies to address what they initially deemed “global warming.” In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was born, which was intended to combat “dangerous human interference with the climate system.”

Since then, the United Nations and several other influential international organizations have pounded the climate change message while weaving a spiderweb of agreements, treaties, and protocols to mitigate the so-called climate crisis.

While these powerful global institutions were ringing the alarm bell that the future of the planet was in immediate jeopardy due to humanity’s use of fossil fuels, a network of grifters emerged who were more than ready to capitalize on the alarmist narrative.

From former Vice President Al Gore to scores of scientists, it became clear that if one jumped on the climate alarmist bandwagon in these early days, there was money to be made and government grants to be gotten.

Not much later, we began to witness high-ranking political officials from both sides of the aisle succumb to the climate alarmist narrative. For instance, way back in 2001, then-President George W. Bush was touting his administration’s climate change agenda.

Then came the cultural deluge as K-12 educators, professors, actors and actresses, TV and radio personalities, social media influencers, and even uneducated child activists from Sweden persistently peddled the climate alarmist narrative.

However, what goes up must come down.

After more than two decades of unyielding climate alarmism, climate realism is slowly starting to take hold.

How do I know this? Because ordinary, hard-working Americans are no longer buying into climate alarmism hook, line, and sinker.

According to multiple polls, climate change is no longer a top concern for the vast majority of Americans.

Americans are finally starting to understand the truth about climate change while simultaneously becoming aware that climate alarmists have ulterior motives at hand, many of which are in direct opposition to the fundamental best interests of everyday Americans.

Thanks to courageous truth seekers like my colleagues at The Heartland Institute and many allied organizations, Americans are more able than ever to receive accurate information dispelling common myths and lies pushed by climate alarmists. As anyone can read at ClimateRealism.com, the seas are not rising and weather events like hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, etc. are not becoming more frequent nor deadlier. In fact, in many cases, the exact opposite is occurring.

Another huge factor that helped Americans realize the dubiousness of the climate alarmist narrative is that their solutions make no sense, do not address the so-called problems, and all too often end with less liberty and more government. Apparently, Americans are beginning to understand that climate justice, for instance, is mostly about wealth redistribution and has little to do with a cleaner environment.

A few weeks ago, Americans went to the polls and clearly rejected the climate alarmist nonsense that has been hoisted upon the nation over the past four years. Without a doubt, the Biden-Harris administration has been the most zealous when it comes to climate alarmism. From nixing the Keystone XL Pipeline to mandating electric vehicles to deciding the type of appliances Americans can purchase, the Biden-Harris administration has been all-in on climate alarmism.

But this is not what the American people want. To be clear, nearly all Americans want to protect the environment and desire clean air and water.

They just don’t want their lives upended and their bank accounts drained under the guise of saving the planet. They want reliable and affordable electricity. They want cheap gasoline. And, they want the U.S. government to take full advantage of the abundant energy reserves right under our feet. This is at least partly why President-elect Donald Trump won the White House and the GOP took control of the U.S. Senate.

Now that Trump is back in the Oval Office, we can expect U.S. energy dominance, not climate alarmism, to rule the day. That is welcome news for hard-working Americans, albeit a total nightmare for climate alarmists and the cottage industry it has spawned.

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.” (- Michael Mann, below)

The futile, wasteful anti-CO2 crusade is in its 37th year, dating from the hot, dry summer of 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm before U.S. lawmakers, led by Al Gore.

Last week, the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) ended with acrimony over an unenforceable agreement pledging to transfer wealth to developing (Statist) countries for “clean” energy development.

CO2 emissions cuts? With almost all major emitters well beyond the targets set in the 2015 Paris Accord, the (also) unenforceable agreement is losing more and more every day as self-interest swamps aspirations. The recipient welfare states described COP29 as “chaotic,” “complete failure,” “optical illusion,” “stage managed,” and “paltry.” Big Green recognized the international effort as more greenwashing than progress, not unlike prior COP results. Mainstream media has tried to paint a happy face on the walking dead.

COP29’s failure should not be surprising? Stated James Hansen.

[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.

But it all begins with the physical science, and the science of climate alarmism has really never recovered from its PR disaster 15 years ago: Climategate. No amount of whitewashing can erase the words, sentences, and paragraphs of one of the greatest scientific scandals of our time. Four categories are mentioned below:

Man-Made Warming Controversy

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.”

—Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.

“Keith’s [Briffa] series…differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.

“…it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]…”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003

“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004.

“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008

“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

—Dr. Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Oct. 12, 2009.

Manipulating Temperature Data

“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Nov. 16, 1999

“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were….

—Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006.

“If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip….”

—Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008.

“We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”

—Climatic Research Unit web site, the world’s leading provider of global temperature data, admitting that it can’t produce the original thermometer data, 2011.

Data Suppression; Freedom of Information (FOI) Avoidance

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, email to Warwick Hughes, 2004.

“I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Feb. 21, 2005.

“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…. Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008.

“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009.

Subverting the Peer-Review Process

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

—Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004.

Implications

The establishment whitewashed and then pretended that the episode was over. Mr. Climategate himself, Michael Mann, called the episode “pathetic” and “shameless”. [1] “After three inquiries, thousands of column inches and several death threats,” Dave Reay wrote in Nature, “the ‘Climategate’ affair is now subsiding into the long grass of conspiracy blogs.” [2]

Nope. Climategate is nary forgotten as a blatant case of professional misconduct and a classic case of ‘Busted!”. It lives in infamy.

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[1] Mann added:

As for emails that in some way involve me, I hardly see anything damning at all, despite these snippets all being taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad…. Agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change. So they have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat.”

[2] Better reactions were made by Derek Lowe in Science who stated, “what I feel needs to be looked at is the scientific conduct. I’m no climatologist, but I am an experienced working scientist – so, is there a problem here?”

I’ll give you the short answer: yes. I have to say that there appears to be several, as shown by many troubling features in the documents that have come out. The first one is the apparent attempts to evade the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. I don’t see how these messages can be interpreted in any other way as an attempt to break the law, and I don’t see how they can be defended…. A second issue is a concerted effort to shape what sorts of papers get into the scientific literature. Again, this does not seem to be a matter of interpretation; such messages as this, this, and this spell out exactly what’s going on. You have talk of getting journal editors fired…. A third issue I want to comment on are the problems with the data and its analysis…. No matter what you think about climate change, if you respect the scientific endeavor, this is very bad news. Respect has to be earned. And it can be lost.

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Editor’s note: Watts Up With That broke the Climategate story back in 2009

Many of our posts about the incident and controversy can be found on this page.