OPINION
Last week, we Tasmanians shivered through the iciest, bleakest weather many of us could recall. Frost that didn’t lift for a week. Day after day of temperatures below zero. Pipes freezing and bursting. Only a few old-timers remembered a colder spell, when the Mersey River froze over, 50 years ago.
Through it all, a common joke was, “I can’t wait for the Bureau of Meteorology to tell us that it’s the warmest winter on record!”
In the UK, where it’s supposed to be summer right now, but apparently showing precious little sign of it, many are feeling the same.
As we all shiver in the autumnal weather during what is meant to be summer and some of us have even turned our central heating back on or continued using our winter duvets, there is one certainty – in a few weeks time, the good folk at Met Office and the BBC will tell us that we’ve just had the “warmest June on record”. After all, the Met Office and the BBC made the same claim about appalling April and miserable May.
They did not disappoint.
Well, just as I predicted, we’ve been told that June was the hottest on record: From the Mail: ‘Last month was officially the hottest June on record’.
The trick they used was a common one for climate cultists – carefully not mentioning what, exactly, “on record” means. In this case, they meant “back when Ronald Reagan was making his first presidential bid”.
What the ‘scientists’ used as the start of records this time is the year 1980 – a few years after satellites began to be used to measure the Earth’s temperature. Before the late 1970s, there was no way of measuring the Earth’s temperature as temperatures were not recorded in many places.
Somehow, “in the last 40 years” doesn’t seem so threatening.
More to the point, 1980 was the tail end of a minor cooling event. And 1980 was also around the time that a leading ocean and atmospheric scientist (what would today be called a climate scientist) told me, “I firmly believe we are seeing the beginning of the next Ice Age.”
The Next Ice Age was a big thing in the ’70s.
Temperatures were so low that even the climate-catastrophist Guardian newspaper predicted a new Ice Age.
The CIA was commissioned to write a report for the US President about the consequences of the coming Ice Age.
And the experts worried that the global cooling would never stop:
But the Earth – as it will, being a dynamic planet – soon fluctuated back the other way.
The climate catastrophists have never got around to explaining to us how global temperatures could have cooled for around 20 years in the 1960s and 1970s while levels of atmospheric CO2 were increasing. I guess that’s a question we’re not supposed to ask, otherwise we might conclude that the climate king has no clothes.
Nor how the 1920s and ’30s were so hot, when atmospheric CO2 levels were so much lower than the Boomers’ heyday. The ’20s and ’30s were also a period when five more acres of forest burned in wildfires in the USA than today.
Imagine if they’d had Climate Cultists back then.