According to the usual suspects, Monday July 22 was the “hottest day ever on Earth”, smash-o-shattering the previous record for blistering death heat set on Sunday July 21. To which, as Matthew Wielicki retorted indignantly, “we are currently still in an ice age and for the vast majority of the last 550 million years the planet was significantly warmer.” So no, not the hottest day ever. Even if we leave out, say, the Hadean Eon. Or, referring simply to more recent conditions, most people do not seem to be living through anything approaching record temperatures. Sure, the Earth is a big place and someone somewhere is setting some kind of weather record every day and would be even if the average hadn’t changed in 5,800 years. But really, things appear quite normal, even cool, yet they keep yelling stuff like “World breaks hottest day record again, despite El Nino's end.”

Or “Driven by oceans that won't cool down, an unseasonably warm Antarctica and worsening climate change, Earth's record hot streak dialed up this week, making Sunday, then Monday, the hottest days humans have measured, according to the European climate service.” And we’re meant to believe it was exactly, precisely 17.15°C globally on Monday. And this statistic is clearly a load of rubbish because nobody, but nobody, knows how warm it was to two decimal places anywhere, let alone everywhere. And is that meant to be the aggregate of the high temperature on every single part of the land and sea throughout a 24-hour period, or of the temperature at some particular instant? Actually it’s meant to be the daily average, so they measured the precise temperature to two decimal places everywhere at every single second? Pfui.

Admittedly some slightly more sober sources than, well, most of them, only claim that Monday was the hottest day “humans have measured”. And to its credit CBS even managed to limit its headline to “Monday was hottest day ever measured by humans, beating Sunday, European science service says: ‘Uncharted territory’”. But this too is statistical bunk. Measured how? The reason we have fairly confident assessments of the temperature back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth is that we have measured them using proxies we trust.

For that matter we know it was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum which isn’t exactly “uncharted territory” so much as “the time when civilization flourished and writing was invented”. Those dang proxies again. How dare people do science?

Oh, measured by thermometers, you say? Well alright then. Except of course that Monday’s pseudo-record was not measured using thermometers. Instead it was “[p]rovisional satellite data”, that most ironclad of statistically absurd guesses.

Yes, statistically absurd. You could believe satellite measurements are a lot more comprehensive and exact than they really are without falling for the notion that “Monday was 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degree Fahrenheit) hotter than Sunday” worldwide. Because nobody, including Copernicus that made this guessurement, knows what the temperature is anywhere to 0.06C, let alone what it is everywhere. Yet we’re meant to swallow whole that:

“July 22 was the hottest day in recorded history, according to provisional data from the European climate service. The reading of 17.15 degrees Celsius (62.87 degrees Fahrenheit) beat the record set the previous day.”

Whereas July 21 was a mere 17.09C. Go ahead. Tell us how hot it was when Caesar was assassinated, to two decimal places, even in Rome alone. Or just in the Forum. Bosh. You can’t.

And another thing. If it’s hotter than the hottest thing ever everywhere on Earth, why isn’t it anywhere on Earth? Especially the United States, which has just about the most complete and accurate long-term thermometer readings anywhere outside the Central England Temperature data set. Instead there’s a famous map of the United States made by Chris Martz using NOAA data and showing that the vast majority of states set their all-time records back in the 1930s whereas only three have done so in this century. (Before the authorities tampered with that data, we mean.) And indeed, to cite just one of hundreds of examples from Tony Heller’s spelunking in U.S. temperature archives:

“On July 25, 1943 almost the entire US was over 90F, and 26 states were over 100F.  Summers used to be much hotter in the US.”

How can it be, if it’s now hotter than Hades? Well, because modern temperature data consists of invented past readings and a lot of “reanalysis” of current ones. Plus on climate you can say just anything.

For instance Scientific American blared “It’s Going to Hit 90 Degrees in Alaska This Week. Temperatures in Fairbanks, Alaska, are predicted to reach a record-tying 90 degrees Fahrenheit because of a prolonged, unusually late heat wave”. Which it didn’t. But who’s counting? The point is to prove man-made global warming is a disaster, not report what really happened.

Thus that widely recycled AP story we started with included this gem:

“‘We are in an age where weather and climate records are frequently stretched beyond our tolerance levels, resulting in insurmountable loss of lives and livelihoods,’ Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.”

Sic, though we assume Koll “said” it or something. For instance “blithered”, because if weather is stretched beyond our tolerance levels we can’t tolerate it, whereas there have never been more or more prosperous people on the planet. And moreover cold kills a lot more people than heat even in, to take a place at non-random, India. The sort of thing you’d expect a person with his job title to know.

Now how’s this for weird? In the midst of this conflagration, AP did find a voice of sanity and it was… Michael E. Mann:

“‘For most of the last 120,000 years, we were in an ice age and today is clearly warmer than that,’ said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, adding that studies indicate we are now in the hottest period in the last 10,000 years. But it’s still a difficult determination to make, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, because data from tree-rings, corals and ice cores don’t go back that far.”

Which is a remarkably polite way of asking what git hasn’t heard of the Holocene Climate Optimum, especially if they work in the field.

Also, to get all technical, the story eventually says that:

“While 2024 has been extremely warm, what kicked this week into new territory was a warmer-than-usual Antarctic winter, with temperatures 6 to 10 degrees Celsius (10.8 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal, [Carlo Buontempo, the director of the European climate service Copernicus] said. The same thing happened on the southern continent last year when the record was set in early July. If it weren’t for Antarctica, it’s likely the record would not have been broken, Buontempo said.”

So Antarctica is blazing away and the rest of the planet isn’t? it would explain a lot, but not why you all call this stuff global warming.

P.S. How do they really know what temperature it is in Antarctica? Despite the distortion of conventional Mercator maps, it’s actually pretty big, some 14.2 million square kilometres (or 5.5 million square miles), nearly half again as big as Europe. And it contains exactly how many weather stations? Right. One hundred and thirty-seven so one for every 40,000 square miles or so.