Large parts of the US, especially in the west, are experiencing a heatwave, on the heels of much of the eastern US having experienced a brutally cold winter. The latter of course was just weather, while CNN declares of the heatwave “Yes, it’s climate change.” They got their assurance on that from the usual suspects at World Weather Attribution who examined data all the way back to 1950 and declared it was “virtually impossible without human-induced climate change”. WWA being the ones who also said this about a heatwave in 2021, but as we discussed in our video Dousing the Hot Hype their fellow scientists slammed their hyperbole, pointing out the weather conditions were so rare they were virtually impossible “with or without global warming.” But just how rare are heatwaves in the US? According to the IPCC, past US National Climate Assessments and, most importantly, the pre-1950 data, not very.
In 2012 the IPCC’s Special Report on Extreme Weather had these things to say:
“From a paleoclimate perspective recent droughts are not unprecedented, with severe ‘megadroughts’ reported in the paleoclimatic record for Europe, North America, and Australia... In North America, there is medium confidence that there has been an overall slight tendency toward less dryness (wetting trend with more soil moisture and runoff; Table 3-2), although analyses for some subregions also indicate tendencies toward increasing dryness.... The most severe droughts in the 20th century have occurred in the 1930s and 1950s, where the 1930s Dust Bowl was most intense and the 1950s drought most persistent (SREX p. 170)”
The US 4th National Climate Assessment in 2017 said:
“Heat waves (6-day periods with a maximum temperature above the 90th percentile for 1961–1990) increased in frequency until the mid-1930s, became considerably less common through the mid-1960s, and increased in frequency again thereafter. As with warm daily temperatures, heat wave magnitude reached a maximum in the 1930s.”
The 5th NCA only looked at heat wave records after 1960, which as the DOE Team pointed out left readers with a false impression since the record showed that while heatwave numbers were up in the west, they remained low compared to the 1930s east of the Rockies.
Meanwhile, going farther back in time, paleoclimate evidence shows the US west has been heatwave central since the invention of heat. Meteorologist Chris Martz summed up a lot of the science on this topic in a recent X post. As bad as the 1930s Dust Bowl was, even worse droughts happened long ago:
“Notably, multi-decadal droughts during both the 13th and 16th centuries exceeded the 1930s drought by intensity and duration, all naturally forced. A tree-ring analysis in Nebraska found that the 13th century Medieval drought lasted an incredible 38 years.”
One of the studies he cited, published in 1998, stated:
“Historical documents, tree rings, archaeological remains, lake sediment, and geomorphic data make it clear that the droughts of the twentieth century, including those of the 1930s and 1950s, were eclipsed several times by droughts earlier in the last 2000 years, and as recently as the late sixteenth century. In general, some droughts prior to 1600 appear to be characterized by longer duration (i.e., multidecadal) and greater spatial extent than those of the twentieth century... it is clear that major multiyear Great Plains drought has occurred naturally once or twice a century over the last 400 years... During the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, there is evidence for two major droughts that likely significantly exceeded the severity, length, and spatial extent of twentieth-century droughts.”
So yes there is a heatwave, and yes they are rare in March, and yes the usual suspects are jumping to the usual conclusion. But the west is prone to heatwaves and droughts and has been for a long time. So if you are in the affected region take the usual precautions to stay cool and hydrated, and try not to get overheated when the alarmists try to tell you the weather is all your fault.
