From the Climate scientists at NOAA:
The global surface temperature for June 2022 was the sixth-highest in the 143-year record at 0.87°C (1.57°F) above the 20th century average. This month was also 0.08°C (0.14°F) cooler than the warmest June on record set in 2019. The ten warmest Junes have all occurred since 2010. June 2022 also marked the 46th consecutive June and the 450th consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average.
And now (as is tradition) a graph:
From Scientific American:
Hundreds of people have already died, and the heat is expected to linger this week in some areas. For the first time ever, the U.K.’s Meteorological Office issued a “red” heat warning — its highest heat alert level, indicating a national emergency — for London, Manchester and other U.K. regions for today and tomorrow
Temperatures could top 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever recorded in the U..K, according to the Met Office. The previous record, observed in Cambridge in 2019, topped out just shy of 102 F.
France has also issued “red” alerts for its western region, which is also likely to see temperatures topping 104 F, according to the country’s national weather service. The country has broken multiple monthly temperature records in the last few days.
And:
“Greenhouse gas emissions, from burning fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil, are making heatwaves hotter, longer-lasting and more frequent,” Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-lead of the extreme weather research consortium World Weather Attribution, said in a statement. “Heatwaves that used to be rare are now common; heatwaves that used to be impossible are now happening and killing people.”
And yet Pennsylvania State Senator (and now GOP cand. for PA Governor) Doug Mastriano, this learned as part of the reporting on the current expunging of his extreme record, was on record with this:
In early April, Doug Mastriano was recording a Facebook Live video on his phone after a legislative session in Harrisburg when he segued into his thoughts on global warming.
The state senator from south-central Pennsylvania, who would become the Republican nominee for governor the following month, told his supporters he wanted to pull the state out of a program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, calling it “nonsense” that human activity could significantly alter the earth’s climate.
A connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming? Merely a “theory,” Mastriano said, based on “pop science.”
“Heck, the weatherman can’t get the weather right 24 hours out,” he said.
Actually this isn't really true.
Again, from NOAA:
A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.
And in any event, that's weather - not climate (weather is local - climate is global).
How accurate are the climate change models?
From NASA:
In a study accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a research team led by Zeke Hausfather of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a systematic evaluation of the performance of past climate models. The team compared 17 increasingly sophisticated model projections of global average temperature developed between 1970 and 2007, including some originally developed by NASA, with actual changes in global temperature observed through the end of 2017. The observational temperature data came from multiple sources, including NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) time series, an estimate of global surface temperature change.
The results: 10 of the model projections closely matched observations. Moreover, after accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other factors that drive climate, the number increased to 14. The authors found no evidence that the climate models evaluated either systematically overestimated or underestimated warming over the period of their projections.
“The results of this study of past climate models bolster scientists’ confidence that both they as well as today’s more advanced climate models are skillfully projecting global warming,” said study co-author Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. “This research could help resolve public confusion around the performance of past climate modeling efforts.”
So Senator Mastriano, given your near complete misunderstanding of climate science (and, it seems, locally based meteorology) will you be correcting these errors any time soon?
