×
See Comments down arrow

Arctic in flames, film at 11

08 Jul 2020 | News Roundup

Every week or so we get definitive proof that man-made climate change is real and urgent and only mentally defective deplorables don’t grasp that “The science has been settled to the highest degree, so now the key to progress is understanding our psychological reactions”. The most recent is this story that it hit a hundred degrees (38° Celsius) in the Arctic circle in June and it’s all over. Media used language like “unbelievably superhot” and “It’s out of the covid-pan and into the global warming fire”. Of course we don’t even know if the thermometer reading was accurate, or the event unprecedented. But never mind. Some stories are just too good to check.

On Watts Up With That, Michael Kile provides some of that famous context we keep hearing about. Starting with the measurement being made in Verkhoyansk, which is technically within the Arctic circle though only just (by 10 km). But one might possibly also show some amazingly low temperatures within the Arctic circle, for instance at a place called Verkhoyansk, whose record low temperature of -67.8° Celsius has only been exceeded (or is the right term here inceeded?) in Antarctica. And if it is indeed warming it’s not doing so very fast: It has never recorded a temperature above freezing between November 10 and March 14. But it did hit 37.3° C back in 1988 so this new figure, if accurate, only beats the previous one by about 2/3 of a degree.

It also turns out that Verkhoyansk is known for weather extremes including a remarkable range between its bitter lows (average monthly temperature in January -45.4° C) and its moderate highs (from June through August average +10. C). As the World Meterological Organization (WMO) notes, Verkhoyansk is “in a region of Eastern Siberia which has an extreme very harsh dry continental climate (very cold winter and hot summer).”

Being seriously landlocked, it is exposed to the unmitigated impact of Siberian winter during same. But during the summer, including 24 hours a day of sunlight from May 30 through July 14, the heat can get trapped there too. As Kile notes, “If the June 20, 2020 temperature of +38.0 °C (100.4 °F) is confirmed, it would produce a record annual range of 105.8 °C (190.4 °F). Only Oymyakon, Yakutsk, Delyankir and Canada’s Fort Vermilion have ranges higher than 100 °C (180 °F).”

If. Because another crucial point here is that the reading has not in fact been verified. The WMO is on it, of course, because it’s such great ammunition for the warming scare. And the media didn’t wait for verification; they pounced on the reading and declared that finding out if it was true was a formality. But the news that a town known for temperature extremes may have just broken a record set more than 30 years ago by a fraction of a degree just doesn’t have the same oomph. Especially not when “The science behind climate change has been proven correct to the highest degree of certainty the scientific method allows” and “now the climate science has been proven to be true to the highest degree possible, we have to stop being reasonable and start being emotional.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

searchtwitterfacebookyoutube-play