An alarming message is being circulated widely: Because of human beings, July 2023 was the hottest month not just since modern record keeping began, but also likely since as far back as 125,000 years ago.
“This is insane and terrifying!” she wrote on July 26.
Higher up in the U.N. than Ms. Kianni, Secretary-General António Guterres declared that “the era of global boiling has arrived” for planet Earth.
Satellite records show that July 2023 was, on average, a scorcher, likely breaking a record for that month and in absolute terms since the satellite record began.
Yet, in the view of climate skeptic Steve Milloy, the strongest claims about last month’s weather don’t stand up to scrutiny.
“We’re talking about the hottest day and the hottest month [in 125,000 years] and there’s no way that a sediment core or a tree ring can reveal that,” Mr. Milloy, who served on former President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, said in an Aug. 2 interview with The Epoch Times.
‘Warmest July on Record’
Some of the core news that touched off the latest fears came from the European Union’s Copernicus program for Earth observation. It found that the first three weeks of July 2023 were “the warmest three-week period on record.”Copernicus also predicted the month will go down as the hottest in the ERA5 record, which combines satellite measurements and other historical data to estimate global temperatures since 1940.
“All the reported findings from the Copernicus Climate Change service are based on computer-generated analyses using billions of measurements from not only satellites, but also ships, aircraft, and weather stations around the world,” a spokesperson for Copernicus told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 3 email. The approach to assessing temperatures is known as a “reanalysis,” a reassessment of older data intended to produce a gap-free view of the climate in recent times.
Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, seen by some as a climate change skeptic, similarly concluded that July 2023 was the “warmest July on record” with the “warmest absolute temperature (since July is climatologically the warmest month).”
His temperature dataset begins not in 1940 but in 1979, with the advent of the satellite record from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Mr. Milloy told The Epoch Times that April 1998 was “on par” with this July, in terms of how much warmer it is than temperatures averaged between 1991 and 2021. Average global temperatures that month were 0.62 degrees Celsius above that baseline, while average global temperatures in July 2023 were 0.64 degrees Celsius above it. By that same measure, February 2016 was even more aberrantly warm.
He said imprecision at temperature stations undermines efforts to make fine-grained comparisons on the order of hundredths of degrees Celsius.
‘An Unusual Month’
“July 2023 was an unusual month,” Mr. Spencer wrote on his blog. He speculated that water vapor blasted into the stratosphere by the January 2022 eruption of the submarine Hunga Tonga volcano could be a contributor.“Water vapor is the largest greenhouse gas by far,” Mr. Milloy said, noting that the Krakatoa-scale eruption “is going to warm the atmosphere for a while.”
Copernicus’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, told CNN that the recent warmth is primarily traceable to carbon dioxide resulting from human activity.
At what point do we jump from comparisons across decades to measurements spanning millennia?
The Copernicus spokesperson explained that the 125,000-year claim derives from assessments in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
That document expresses “medium confidence” in the assertion that surface temperatures on Earth were last this high during the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago.
Antarctic Heat
Mr. Milloy attributed the aberrant global temperatures last month to unusually warm conditions in Antarctica.
“That heat wave was only detected because of satellites. So, before 1979, heat waves like that in Antarctica could have happened many times and affected global temperature many times, and we would really have no idea,” he said.
Ms. Burgess, co-deputy director of Copernicus, disagreed.
“July records are not distorted by any temperatures in [Antarctica],” she told The Epoch Times in a LinkedIn message responding to Mr. Milloy’s claims.
