Matthew Wielicki writes “You’ve probably seen it by now. National Geographic and every major outlet are screaming some version of: ‘2024 was the hottest year ever – and the coldest year of the rest of your life.’” Which could prompt a sardonic comment on the odd way that legacy media outlets, instead of competing with one another, now all appear to be tentacles of the same beast. But instead his comment is that “These headlines are not scientific conclusions; they are marketing slogans designed to reinforce a narrative—that today's warming is not just unusual, but unprecedented and therefore catastrophic.” But, he says, “That claim collapses the moment you ask a simple question: Compared to what?” His answer is the historical record, and we agree. But we’d also point to what you actually experienced last year.
Wielicki is correct that climate alarmism has rather trapped itself with the shrillness of its messaging. It can no longer concede that yes, whatever is happening is a slow and uncertain process and then urge prudence. It wants us to feel afraid. Indeed it wants us to panic so that radical measures can be shoved through and all painful side effects ignored. Which isn’t doing well in the real world of policy. But it’s also failing in the real world of data.
As Wielicki points out, the “hottest year ever”, even if one were so foolish as to buy into Michael Mann’s hockey stick, ignores:
“the much warmer periods that came before, including the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM), which occurred between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago. During this period, most of the Northern Hemisphere was significantly warmer than today, despite pre-industrial CO2 levels.”
And he then reminds readers of all the proxy data from ancient tree lines to Bronze Age artifacts beneath retreating glaciers which, treating proxies with due caution, still strike us as decisive. But there is this other point here.
We have been collecting various examples of claims that 2024 was hotter than the hottest thing ever but 2025 had already roasted its carcass before it was well under way. For instance Britain’s Times just hollered:
“The UK is set to experience the warmest start to May on record with temperatures reaching up to 30C on Thursday.”
And again we could grumble about “on record” since surely the Holocene Climatic Optimum is “on record”. They probably mean in the modern thermometer era, which is cherry-picking because it starts during the Little Ice Age. Or we could grumble that the Times is reporting things that haven’t happened yet since, as the piece conceded, Monday April 28 was the warmest actually to have happened when that story was filed, with just 24.5C and that in a major urban area. A hugely major massive one. London.
Or that it’s reporting things that may well not happen, as it then quoted a weatherperson that:
“As high pressure continues to dominate the UK weather, we will see the temperatures building day on day through the week with Thursday seeing the peak of the heat with 29C or even a chance we could see 30C.”
So we went from “temperatures reaching up to 30C” to “a chance we could see 30C”. And what actually happened? Why, the mercury soared to … um… 28C. In Kew Gardens in, again, London, a massive megalopolis given to trapping heat for reasons unrelated to climate. Then it cooled down again (at time of writing the daily high was 64F or 18C.)
In reporting this sizzling May 1 result, and insisting that it was “officially the hottest start to May on record in the UK, the Met Office has confirmed”, The Independent conceded that “Despite the soaring temperatures, the Met Office has ruled out a heatwave this week.” Which it went on to say would require three consecutive days above the “heatwave threshold”, which “is 25C for most of the UK, rising to 28C in London.”
Oh really? And why is that? Not by any chance an Urban Heat Island effect here, is there?
And how much confidence, again, does anyone have in our ability to say whether there were periods exceeding this fabled “heatwave threshold” in London, or in Inverness, during the Medieval Warm Period or shortly before Claudius invaded? (Which was in AD43, to save you the trouble of Googling; it was also during the “Roman Warm Period” when the Romans who invaded Britain created a thriving wine industry, as also existed during the Medieval Warm Period Michael Mann does not allow to exist with the active connivance of much of the press and it seems the Met Office.) And if the Times is reporting things happening that didn’t even happen in May 2025, what confidence do you have in their account of May 1225?
BTW a piece in The Independent said:
“Europe is the fastest-warming continent in the world as countries were hit by clear climate change impacts, extreme weather and record temperatures in 2024, a major annual report shows. Around 100 scientists and experts contributed to the UN-led European State of the Climate 2024, which found that last year was the warmest on record for the continent.”
European journalists were chuffed to be cooking fastest. And one could probably start quite the brawl by telling someone doing a State of the Climate 2024 on some other continent, or a journalist there, that they didn’t get to be warming fastest. But instead we’re going to note that the UAH data do show a very recent spring 2025 upward bounce but it still hasn’t equalled 1998 or 2016 figures, and it is still unclear what effects the Hunga Tonga eruption had or how long they will last.
Inside Climate News called 2024 “a year of record-setting heat, intensifying extreme weather and a bitterly partisan presidential election”. And yes, it was a partisan election, though again anyone who knows their history would question whether it was really more bitter than many others, from 1800 on. But there’s no sign of intensifying extreme weather and we are authentically baffled at this “record-setting heat”. How many places actually set their all-time record in 2024? (Bearing in mind that if hundreds of thousands of localities are monitoring the temperature on a daily basis, even with nothing but random fluctuation around an invariant mean there would be lots of records set.)
So we ask you, in genuine puzzlement: was your 2024 really unprecedentedly and wretchedly hot? We realize that anecdote is unreliable, not least because our memories can play us false. We’re all for checking the archives, especially ones not fiddled by the state. But how can 2024 have been the hottest year ever, or on record, everywhere generally if it wasn’t the hottest in living memory anywhere specific? What do they even think this claim means? Or is it just something they now have to say, having trapped themselves with their fiery rhetoric?
The year 2024 was a wet, cool and cold one in Ireland. Even western France experienced a cooler summer last year than usual. No, there is nothing to see in this hysterical claim of overheating. As regards 2025 in Ireland, we've had quite a sunny spell since mid-April, but no sign yet of any soaring temperatures; if anything, the temperatures have been lower on average for this time of year.
The Dirty Thirties remain the hottest decade in North America. Has no one ever heard of the Dust Bowl years in Saskatchewan, or that Alberta went bankrupt?
Here in Kamloops British Columbia Canada last year 2024 was pretty much average with a cool spring and warm summer but certainly not any warmer than usual. We didn't set one temperature record either low or high and it's been this way in the last 50 years I've lived here. So far this year it's slightly below normal or right on normal. I'm told that the fact that I haven't seen any change here is irrelevant because the global temps are the problem not my little geographic area to which I say , so if it's global I'm pretty sure my area is part of the globe.
Which "record" are they using for the comparison, and which data set?
In the uk we know that more than a quarter of temperature data is fabricated and the
results are biased upwards by using airfield data which always seem to be the hottest.
We also know that the Met office uses a series of temperatures from the 1950's for comparison.
So a "hot" biased observation compared to a "cool" historic dats series.
Of course it was the hottest ever, just follow the fabricated science !!
It’s far worse than not knowing what the temperature was in the previous warm periods. No one knows what the world temperature was today! There simply is no way to measure the temperature of the whole world, which would require knowing the temperature of every point on earth at a specified UTC time (or better yet, the temperature for every point on earth at every UTC time) which we do not have the capability to measure. For any government agency, like say NASA or Environment Canada, or any University climate study center to claim they know what the earth’s temperature was on any given day or average for any given year means they are lying—they know they cannot make this measurement. And then you have NASA/NOAA actively lying about what the temperature was in the more recent past—these pronouncements are not worth the toilet paper these people have already used and flushed down their low volume toilets.
Imagine you are a journalist specializing in climate-related stuff with a daily requirement to provide several hundred words of copy. Now imagine a day in which nothing much happens. So you just invent something - "hottest year ever, massive floods and droughts predicted to destroy western civilization" and so on and so forth. Nobody is going to remember it the next day, but heck, it will attract readers and that's all that matters. After all, who wants to read stories that say "everying is fine and dandy, no need to worry, have a nice day"?
So three days of 25C constitutes a heat wave?That's 77F.And perhaps the "100 scientists and experts" who claim that Europe experienced the "hottest year ever",should have consulted the 1000+ scientists,experts,engineers at Clintel first before making their absurd alarmist claim!
My personal way of judging whether it's exceptionally hot is: is it hard to get to sleep because of the heat? In 1976, for example, still the hottest year I have ever experienced, there were entire weeks when I found it difficult to get to sleep - and I lived in Scotland at the time.
Last year there was not a single night when I found it difficult to get to sleep - in England. It was a pretty poor summer, with a lot of cloud.
My house does not have air-conditioning, nor have any of the houses I have lived in. It just isn't necessary in Britain. We can put up with the two or three days in a year when AC would be useful.
apparently CO2 only reflects heat one way, passing 100% sun radiation through, while reflecting back 50% trying to escape back into space. of course I only have a marriage license and GED cert., but in my mind the more CO-2 up there, the less pass through there would be, resulting in a more zero gain in temps at the ground level. maybe someone can straighten me out!