Europe is suffering from a heatwave and climate alarmists are claiming vindication. And in the spirit of honesty we must concede up front that yes, it’s the kind of thing they do predict and if it becomes a pattern it will constitute evidence in favour of their theory. Assuming it’s the kind of pattern they predict. But is it? Reuters finds some irony in that “an event dedicated to discussing the impacts of extreme heat at the London School of Economics was cancelled because the venue was too hot.” They can’t blame climate change for the refusal by so many Europeans to install air conditioning. And we further retort that it also got really hot long ago. Bloomberg Green says as much when it explains that in Singapore “The 140-year-old concept known as district cooling is taking root in the tropical island-nation, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average and sharpening the focus on climate adaptation.” The salient detail is not the claim that Singapore is warming twice as fast as the average like every other place including Europe. It’s that people have been talking about the need for cooling for a long time. Which makes us wonder how much we really know about how bad heat waves used to be. A lot, as it turns out.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the hideous heatwave of… um… 1540? Yup. ‘Fraid so. During the onset of the Little Ice Age, no less. But then climate is, uh, variable:
“The year round heat and drought in 1540 was the worst climatic event of this kind since the 1473 heat and drought in Europe. It had catastrophic consequences in large parts of the continent. From February until the end of the year it was exceptionally warm with sparse rainfall. Following a hot, dry spring, the event was triggered by a high-pressure system (an omega block) in the summer, which blocked the Atlantic air currents for several months while cool, showery weather prevailed in western Russia. Estimated annual temperatures in 1540 were by far the highest between 1500 and 2000, while estimated precipitation was by far the lowest registered until 2025. The effects of this endless heat and drought, the most severe since 1473, on natural areas and human communities are described in detail in over 220 chronicles.”
The worst since 1473? And due to an “omega block”? How can it be? And why don’t journalists know?
We have often lamented the apparent failure of their employers to furnish them with these new-fangled online search engines that allow one to check such things without breaking a sweat. But what really seems to be missing is curiosity, especially about anything that might disrupt the hive mind in its moment of triumph.
They have heard of “omega blocks”. But they but seem to think they were invented round about the same time as colouring even moderate warmth bright orange on weather maps. And even Wikipedia insists that it was the highest up to 2000 lest admitting that it might have been higher than 2026 cause talk… or a lack of it. But how do we actually know that it’s hotter now than in 1540? (Or 1665 when Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary “the hottest day that ever I felt in my life”.) And why was it so hot in 1540? And what would modern journalists have written had they lived in 1540? Much the same sort of apocalyptic rhetoric, one imagines, but with the excuse that there was no Internet.
As for today, according to Reuters:
“For Chris Anderson, a climate expert at non-profit Practical Action, the cancellation, as British temperatures hit a provisional record June high, was a stark reminder that the dangers of a warming planet would impact everyone.”
And again we could be rude about just how bad the impact would be on “everyone” if they didn’t have to listen to overheated zealots overheat about overheating. Or anything else, including excessive obsessions with safety. Maybe our ancestors went and listened to speeches in hot rooms because they were tougher than us, not because it’s now Venus in there.
No, really. Because if modern journalists did have search engines, or just subscribed to CDN and watched our videos, they might know that Europe had another stinker in the summer of 1757:
“A very significant heat wave occurred in Europe in July 1757. The heat wave may have been the hottest summer in Continental Europe between the summers of 1540 and 2003. July 1757 was the hottest month in the history of Paris with an average temperature of 25 °C (77 °F) (compared to 24.8 °C during the 2006 European heat wave), and it reached a high of 37.5 °C (99.5 °F) on 14 July. Similarly, over Central England, July 1757 was the hottest month on record since 1659, at the time, and would not be beaten until July 1783. It still is the twelfth-warmest on record in that series. Physician John Huxham reported that the heat caused many maladies. Horace Walpole wrote in July 1757, ‘for how many years we shall have to talk of the summer of fifty-seven!’ There were contemporaneous accounts of the heat wave noting its effects. Physician John Huxham wrote An Account of the Extraordinary Heat of the Weather in July 1757, and the Effects of It, which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1758. Huxham reports on the effects in England, writing that it caused ‘haemorrhages from several parts of the body’, including the nose, and the uterus in women. Among other maladies, Huxham described ‘sudden and violent pains of the head, and vertigo, profuse sweats, great debility and oppression of the spirits, affected many. There were putrid fevers in great abundance.’ Symptoms consistent with dehydration described by Huxham included that ‘the urine was commonly high colored, and in small quantity.’”
Which actually sounds worse than anything reported from Climate Week.
It is also well worth noting that this particular punishing heat struck in the depths of the Little Ice Age, which featured a wide variety of bad weather including that notorious winter of 1709 in which Louis XIV’s sister-in-law wrote from the Versailles palace that:
“The cold here is so fierce that it fairly defies description. I am sitting by a roaring fire, have a screen before the door, which is closed, so that I can sit here with a fur around my neck and my feet in a bearskin sack, and I am still shivering and can barely hold the pen. Never in my life have I seen a winter such as this one, which freezes the wine in bottles.”
Those who wish to return atmospheric CO2 to “pre-industrial” levels to ward off bad weather might want to reconsider based on the historical record, which doesn’t just include ghastly cold but also terrible heat.
Indeed, that Wikipedia item on July 1757 goes on that Horace Walpole “commented that on walking his garden, ‘I thought I should have died of it’…”. Yet without AC people apparently went about their business.
As today, in fact, since that Reuters article droned on:
“Ahead of the COP31 climate talks in Turkey in November, more than 75,000 attendees from governments, companies, finance and civil society joined 1,300 events discussing ways to accelerate climate action, organisers said. Resilience to heat and other extreme weather events such as drought, floods and storms – which hit many developing countries least able to manage them – was a key area of focus.”
The implication being that poor countries, sorry, “developing countries”, didn’t have drought, floods and certainly not storms until the invention of climate shortly after poor got rephrased as “developing” about half a century ago. (You may think we’re being unduly sarcastic, but if Bloomberg Green can write with a straight typeface that “change is needed to make Londoners’ lives more bearable in the age of climate change” we can laugh at it.) But note also that having 75,000 people travel to London Climate Week, a remarkably high proportion we dare say by aeroplane and nearly all the rest by various oil- and gas-powered vehicles, suggests that they’re not that serious about carbon footprints and that they didn’t think they would die in the British heat as indeed they have not.
Mind you, the Reuters piece did then say that:
“The calls to move faster come as global heat-related deaths have risen 23% since the 1990s to an average 546,000 deaths a year, many of them in developing countries, an October Lancet report said.”
But as Bjorn Lomborg recently noted of a more recent Lancet study on everyone dying from heat, it is well-established that as people age they become more vulnerable to temperature extremes including heat, and global demographics are shifting toward older populations even in many poor countries.
Also, the Lancet is shifting toward climate hysteria. The title of that October paper’s abstract/screed was the nice, neutral, apolitical “The 2025 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: climate change action offers a lifeline” and the first paragraph was:
“Driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is increasingly claiming lives and harming people’s health worldwide. Mean annual temperatures exceeded 1·5°C above those of pre-industrial times for the first time in 2024. Despite ever more urgent calls to tackle climate change, greenhouse gas emissions rose to record levels that same year. Climate change is increasingly destabilising the planetary systems and environmental conditions on which human life depends.”
And another piece on heat and mortality in, yup, the Lancet noted that:
“found that heatstroke mortality rates vary widely between countries; with Japan reporting the highest, with an annual average of 5·81 deaths per 1 million population (95% CI 4·43–7·62), more than double that of the next highest countries, while many report far lower rates, often less than one death per 1 million population.”
OK now. Everyone together. Is Japan an especially hot tropical country? Or is it nestled in a cool spot off the east coast of Asia, at roughly the same latitude as, say, Vladivostok? Um yeah. The latter. So why such a high rate of heatstroke? Say, would Japan perhaps have the highest share of its population over 65 other than Monaco? Um yeah.
As for that Singaporean wonder of the steam age, it seems a sensible way to try to deal with the Urban Heat Island effect that is, of course, driving a lot of the recent record-setting. As even that piece admitted, quoting a “Team lead for climate resilience at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water”, whatever that might be:
“Climate change is driving baseline temperatures higher, but the way we build our cities is what traps that heat”
We’re not sure about the first part, at least if you mean human-caused though we do not doubt that there’s been a rebound since the Little Ice Age. But the latter is definitely true and of course it distorts thermometer readings for the brief period in which we have them. But nothing can conceal the fact that hot weather, even debilitating hot weather, is not actually new. It’s why architecture has for millennia been concerned with keeping people cool.
Who knew?
