Hottest Day Ever?

This last week, the press has been full of alarmist headlines: Tuesday was the hottest day ever! No, Wednesday was the hottest day ever! Of course, you have to 1) define “ever,” and 2) believe that we have any idea what the average temperature is, over the whole Earth, on a particular day–let alone a particular day 1,000 years ago.

At Watts Up With That?, Paul Homewood comments:

The idea that we know the global temperature today is absurd in itself. But the idea that we actually know what it was on a given day 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago, never mind thousands of years ago is sheer fraud.

And the claim that it is hotter now than 5000 years ago is a total lie – there is abundant evidence that it was much warmer then.

Then there is this:

“It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial,” Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, told the Washington Post.

Wait, what? I didn’t know they had SUVs 125,000 years ago. What made it warm then? You’re not supposed to ask.

So how do alarmists try to impress us with how warm it is?

And as always with all of these silly scare stories, they cherry pick some high temperatures in the Arctic, knowing that the public will find them alarming because they assume the Arctic is always freezing normally.

For instance, “One point in far northern Canada was hotter than Miami.”

The link takes us to Kuujjuaq. [Graphic omitted.]

And the daily temperature from KNMI shows that temperatures over 90F, 32C, are not uncommon there. The new record of 93F replaces the old record of 92F set in 1999, which is hardly cause for panic!

Then there’s Siberia:

“In Siberia, the temperature in Altai hit 94°F.”

But again we learn that temperatures often exceed 90F there; the record of 96F was set in 2000:

More at the link. The moral is, don’t believe anything the global warming alarmists say.

STEVE adds—Steve Milloy has an excellent column on this issue coming out tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal:

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. . .

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.

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.