A new paper in BioScience, which claims to be “A Forum for Integrating the Life Sciences”, starts calmly by saying “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.” And in case you didn’t get the message it continues “We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.” No, you don’t get bonus points for guessing that the typically bloated author list includes Naomi Oreskes and, yes, Michael E. Mann. Or that the paper says “the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024)”. Which is a reference not to an academic paper but to a transcript of UN Secretary-General António Guterres raving at journalists. And they wonder why people don’t trust scientists anymore.

If you want a conspiracy theory with your hyperventilation they’re happy to oblige:

“For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed – and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al. 2023).”

But, to get all scientific for a moment, the “hottest days ever” occurred early in the Earth’s history during the Hadean era when the surface was liquid rock, while even after billions of years of subsequent cooling pretty much the entire Jurassic and Cretaceous were a lot hotter than anything since the Oligocene let alone the Holocene and there is no excuse for this peer-reviewed idiotic blather.

Still, we do want to give a bit of attention to their insistence that 2024 was really hot in the sense of people experiencing hot weather. There are a lot of ways to construct global averages, and if they lean heavily on, oh, say, an unexplained surge in temperature in a fairly small part of the North Atlantic they do not say what you claim they say.

In fact a piece in mid-December, 2024 in the New York Times “Climate Forward” profiled the arguably excessive, and certainly carbon-intensive, gathering of over 25,000 scientists (no really) in “a cavernous convention center to eat dry sandwiches, drink weak coffee and ponder all things Earth and climate and space” at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where the author said the first thing that struck him was that:

“Every month for the past year and a half, the planet has been at or near its warmest point in modern times. This year is ‘virtually certain’ to end up as the hottest on record, according to the European climate monitor. Temperature records aren’t being broken; they’re being leapfrogged. And scientists haven’t quite pinned down why.”

That last bit is suspicious. The “settled science”, after all, is very clear on why: CO2 is cooking the Earth. So what’s the uncertainty? And it turns out that a significant factor was that cloud cover last year was at “a record low”, again an overcooked assertion since nobody knows what cloud cover was like the year Alfred the Great died (899 AD). But the models didn’t predict it beforehand and couldn’t explain it afterward. And it also seems germane to us that the unprecedented heat, which did break the trend line, must have been very unevenly distributed to make them avoid the obvious “Gotcha” explanation.

Actual experience appears to call the official line into question. For instance “NOAA Predicts a Cooler Start to Summer” in the United States. Or “New blizzard warning kicks off Canada’s unofficial start to summer”. Or the Weather Network observation, acutely painful to some, that:

“Toronto’s high temperature this week from May 21-23 is forecast to hover near 10°C – the coldest stretch for those specific dates since May 1967 – the same month the Leafs last hoisted the Stanley Cup.”

Not to mention “Five months after the holidays, parts of Ontario are going to run colder than late December” or “Spring rewind for Atlantic Canada as April-like weather returns”. Also, why does Canada’s tool and craft store Lee Valley Tools promote a very cool-looking “Softwood Kindling Splitter” with the statement that “Cottage season may be around the corner, but cool nights are sticking around”? If it’s so hot in some theoretical everywhere, why is it so cold in so many actual places? (Including an alert reader sending us a message from “Snowbowl” in Arizona saying “MEMORIAL DAY SKIING? YOU BET! WE’RE EXTENDING THE SEASON, AGAIN!”) We are genuinely puzzled.

Including as to what exactly is being measured by the people claiming hottest ever and heating fast. It would be one thing if every part of the planet, or nearly every part, seemed to be roughly the same amount warmer than it was 30 years ago. It’s very different if, say, 70% is around the same temperature or cooler and 30% is a lot warmer. Which is it? Unless we know, these claims of global temperature seem to say far more than they really do even about global temperature. As has been noted, to claim a man with frostbitten feet and a sunburned head is on average perfectly comfortable rather misses the mark.

Checking the UAH satellite data, which do present a global average, we do see that 2024 saw a spike that was above anything since 1979, which is not another way of saying “ever” or “on record”. And again we refer people to Tony Heller’s excellent archival work in arguing that official US government agencies’ downward adjustment of temperatures in the 1930s are illegitimate, not least because the actual tendency of heatwaves to occur across the United States was much stronger in that decade than any since, there having been a significant mid-century cooling that alarmists do not enjoy discussing. But we also wonder whether that satellite data isn’t hiding more than it reveals, if it’s turning a few hot spots and a lot of cool ones into an average that is anything but typical.

We also note that in late 2024 and early 2025 temperatures declined back into warm but not unprecedented territory. Even Reuters, in claiming “Europe experienced its warmest March since records began” (and we won’t repeat the quibble about what they mean by “records” since obviously the term “proxy records” negates that claim) that was, of course, bylined from Europe, insisted that:

“Globally, last month was the planet’s second-warmest March on record – exceeded only by March in 2024, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.”

Another way of putting it would be that March 2025 was cooler than March 2024. But they prefer to default to language like:

“The main driver of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, according to the scientific consensus among climate scientists.”

So if those emissions keep rising, and they do, why was 2025 not hotter?