No, We Didn’t Just See the Hottest World Temperatures in 125,000 Years | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Jon Sanders.

    A headline of "BREAKING: Computer Model Produces Results As Designed" would not sound quite as horrifying as what credulous media treated us with last week. For example, WRAL, which is known to indulge in fearmongering as shamelessly as Winnie-the-Pooh indulges in honey, somehow managed to sandwich the scary news between two other supposedly scary things, the beach and thunderstorms:

(Here is the original link, but it's changed daily, which is why it states it was posted on "Dec. 19.")

    Of course, to reporters, the notion was beyond question that, of all the years in human history, we had indeed witnessed the world's hottest day ever. As we saw during the Covid years, rationalism, logic, and sensible skepticism must all keep quiet while there is opportunity to inflame a panic.

    Founder of JunkScience.com Steve Milloy remained skeptical, however. Writing in Wall Street Journal on July 7, Milloy first explained the problem:

    The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. The claimed temperature was derived from the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, which relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.

    Milloy then explained why the computer model's "guesstimation" is preposterous. It didn't take much, since it should be glaringly obvious:

    One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can't be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.

    He then produced a much lower, much less politically convenient, data-based estimation:

    A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July.

    Milloy proceeded to address several other factors for why this supposed record is implausible and why comparisons going back over 125 millennia are preposterous:

• The meaninglessness of the notion of "average global temperature"
• The fact that the Climate Reanalyzer's results would have been skewed by a July heat wave in the Antarctic
• The known imprecision of nearly all U.S. temperature stations (with margins of error of nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit)
• Limited placement of temperature stations mostly to populated places and very little historic temperature data collection at the poles

    I predict that we will see frequent "world's hottest ever days" in the coming weeks. With so much attention that this result received, we 'll probably soon see competing computer programs geared to produce such scary results.


    After all, world governments are planning great societal upheavals on the notion that humans living their lives to the fullest are causing "catastrophic climate change," but they still need enough people to go along with their proposed solutions of depriving themselves and their neighbors of cars, meat, reliable and inexpensive electricity, farm-fresh vegetables, air conditioning, heating, gas stoves and grills, water heaters, even wood-fired pizzas, among so many, many other things.

    Unlike our media, stay rational and grounded.