(March 22, 2023) If you value independent thought, you have to be able to identify the bubble wrap and break free. Legal expert Andrew Roman offers an escape from climate alarmism bubble wrap.

By Andrew Roman

For the original version of this posting, see here.

For more analysis by Andrew Roman, check out his blog here:
https://andrewromanviews.blog

Escape Your Bubble

What you read online about climate change is carefully targeted by social media algorithms and cookies to keep you in your ideological comfort zone. The TV news is also designed to appeal to the ideology of that channel’s viewer profile. Think of it as emotional bubble wrap.

However, if you value your independent thoughts, you have to be able to identify bubble wrap and break free. This post tries to help with bubble wrap identification. Escaping the bubble wrap is up to you.

Climate Porn: The Hottest Day on Record

Among the most scary climate change “bubble wraps” is the media headline: The hottest day/week/ year “on record”.  It is usually misleading. Here’s how it works.

A common technique starts by taking temperature records from a weather station thermometer that was placed in an unpopulated area in an open field a hundred or more years ago. This record is then compared to a single temperature taken at that same station today, years after it has been surrounded by urbanization, in what is called an ‘urban heat island’.

An urban heat island is heated by heat-radiating infrastructure such as asphalt roads, brick buildings, car parks, air-conditioner exhausts, taxiing jet aircraft etc. Comparing the current and historical readings at such extensively altered weather stations is not an apples to apples comparison.

The Hottest Day in 150 Years at Regan National Airport in Washington

An article in the Washington Post on February 23, 2023, was headlined, “Washington sets daily record high temperature of 81 degrees”:

“It’s official: Thursday is Washington’s warmest February 23 on record …The high temperature at Reagan National Airport hit 81 degrees, breaking the previous record of 78 degrees set on Feb. 23, 1874.”

But the article has a problem. Reagan National Airport, didn’t even exist in 1874. Airplanes didn’t exist then either. The first flight by the Wright Brothers was not until 1903. So what temperature record, taken in 1874, and where, is comparable to the February 23, 2023 temperature reading at Reagan National Airport? The article doesn’t tell us.

Reagan National Airport is located 5 miles (8 km) from downtown Washington. It opened in 1941 and has expanded since then. In 2000 the airport served 16 million passengers, which grew to 24 million in pandemic-influenced 2022. It would be difficult to imagine a more powerful heat island temperature effect than a thermometer at an airport with jets taking off and landing, close to a large city.

The authors of the Washington Post article don’t mention what weather station they used to determine the temperature in 1874. There are two possibilities: a station at the same location as the airport today or a station at another location in the Washington area. Whatever the source, it is wrong to compare a temperature measured at an airport in 2023 with a temperature taken in 1874 at an undisclosed area without the heat island effect of an airport.

On a planet that has warmed only 1 ℃ since 1900, a heat island can easily show a false increase of 2 ℃ or more. The proper use of these urban heat island weather stations is limited to showing today’s weather at that location. It cannot be fairly compared with historical weather records before the heat island was created.

The Washington Post article is but one of many examples of misleading “scary” stories. In an earlier post I explained how it’s possible that, in media stories, every country is warming twice as fast as the average. These stories are bubble wrap designed to retain readers who want to believe climate emergency stories, and in the process, keep them as subscribers to the publication.

The Three Key Questions

The misleading scare stories can be detected by asking and finding the answers to three questions: (i) what is the geographic location of the record? (ii) what is the start date and end date of the record? and (iii), how good is the record?

1. The Geographic Location

As noted above, Reagan National Airport didn’t exist in 1874, but now is an obvious heat island. It is not a good location for comparing temperature records from 1874 with 2023.

2. The Start Date and the End Date

As the local climate fluctuates over the decades, sometimes getting warmer and sometimes getting colder, the chosen starting date of the record often makes the whole story.

By starting “the record” at a colder date and carrying it through to a more normal temperature today, the line in the temperature graph will always slope upward from left to right; and vice versa. For example, starting in the 1950s and going to today will be starting in a cooler time and ending in a warmer time. However, it was much warmer in the 1930s than thereafter, right up to today. If, instead, the starting date had been 1930 the slope of the line would be flatter.

As well, by expanding the scale of the graph on the vertical axis to temperature units as little as 1/10 of a degree, a very slight upward slope can be raised to be much steeper. Likewise, the years selected for the horizontal axis can include only the years that support the story. Someone looking at the graph quickly, without careful analysis, will probably be deceived.

Stories illustrated with these misleading graphs are not limited to temperatures. They are also often used to suggest rapid acceleration in climate-caused extreme weather of all kinds. 

3. How Good is the Record?

It is common to create a temperature record that is not the actual thermometer measurements taken at the time, but instead, for various policy reasons, to use temperatures that have been adjusted by someone’s judgement. In Canada, for example, the federal government department responsible for the climate records has replaced many earlier temperature records with retroactive estimates, as described in adjusted and homogenized canadian climate data. And all of the earlier actual temperature records were deleted, making it impossible to assess the validity of the changes made in the estimates. I don’t object to the fact of adjustment, but the deletion of the actual records eliminates transparency and accountability for the the changes made.

As well, it is only approximately in the last 40 years that the world has had accurate satellite temperature measurements. Previously, although the oceans represent some 71 percent of the planet’s surface, ocean temperatures were often irregularly taken, in different waters at different times of day and year, by ships lifting a bucket of ocean water on board and taking its temperature without calibrated, accurate thermometers. It is not surprising, then, that ocean temperature records before the modern era are largely guesswork. This raises the suspicion that today’s temperature estimates are often made to enhance journalistic or political objectives.

You Can Check for Yourself

Weatherstats.ca is a website that provides data from Environment and Climate Change Canada on weather conditions in Canadian cities since 1913.

As economist Ross McKitrick pointed out in a 2019 Vancouver Sun article:

“Clearly, there’s no climate emergency in Metro Vancouver. Amid the ordinary variability of nature, today’s weather is about the same as it’s been for as far back as the records go. If you think Vancouver is an exception in this regard, go to weatherstats.ca and find a location with a supposed crisis. Lotsa luck.”

The weatherstats.ca site shows that, for more than a century, the trend in average temperatures for most Canadian cities have been pretty much flat. I tried this at Winnipeg weatherstats for Winnipeg, a city with an unusually high variation in summer and winter temperatures:

The blue top line shows the average high temperatures for this 25-year-period; the black bottom line is the average low. The green line in the middle is the mean of the high and low temperatures. As you can see, the green line is pretty much flat for 25 years. But the website has data going back to summer 1913, showing a similar flat line for any 25 year period. This isn’t what we’ve seen in the ‘hottest year on record’ media stories. Yet Winnipeg is not unique, similar flat lines will be seen for most other cities.

How can this graph be so different from the ones we are usually shown? The scary temperature graphs with dramatic ups and downs use a narrow range of 1°-2° Celsius, so a change of even 1/10 of a degree looks huge. And the years shown usually start after 1950, to avoid showing the graph spikes in the hotter 1930s.

Let’s Also Play the Scare Game

To show that anyone can play the scare game I have included two graphs.

The first one, below, shows years of decreasing temperatures (“global cooling“) after the 1998 El Niño natural warming event. El Niño and La Niña are two opposing climate patterns that break normal climate conditions. Both have significant global impacts on weather They occur every two to seven years on average, but they don’t occur on a regular schedule. The El Niño is the naturally occurring warming event, as explained by the US NOAA.

The first graph is intentionally misleading, both because temperatures will normally decrease in the short run after a warming El Niño event and because of the expanded scale of the vertical axis. 

The second graph shows temperatures prior to the same El Niño event in 1998.  It is also misleading in the cherry picked time period, by which the graph is pulled upwards by the warming event in 1998.

Conclusion

There is a conceptual difference between a story that is false and one that is merely misleading. The typical “hottest day on record” stories are not literally false because the writers define “the record” their own way.  So, a record that starts in 1950 may well show that it is perhaps one degree hotter in 2023. However, by cherry picking that starting date, or choosing a heat island location for the recent temperature, or selecting someone’s estimated temperatures, the story can be significantly misleading.

To you, the reader, it may make no difference whether you are needlessly scared by a story that is false or by one that is merely misleading. Neither is fair to the reader.

To protect yourself from having your panic button pushed needlessly and repeatedly by climate porn stories, ask (yourself) and answer the three questions above. Break free of the bubble wrap. And sleep better at night.