18 ms·

There’s something puzzling about these “Earth’s highest”, as back in the 80’s near Lake Chad, it seems we used to see above 40 C often enough it was notable but

There’s something puzzling about these “Earth’s highest”, as back in the 80’s near Lake Chad, it seems we used to see above 40 C often enough it was notable but not at all unusual, and sometimes hotter, 45 C or occasionally 50 C. Past 50 C, the French and German thermometers didn’t have marks. I had 125 F - 135 F in my memory. These articles imply that’s not possible. If a tree falls in the woods ... Or, rather, if the sun heats your day in Africa but nobody measures it, is it not hot? In the surprisingly hot times, your home, at night, furniture was hot to the touch. Weirdest thing, so used to objects indoors at night being cooler to touch. Too hot to sleep, so a trick was to get in shower in a top sheet then get back to bed and hope to fall asleep before very fast evaporation stopped cooling. Everything I’ve researched says I’m mistaken, it wasn’t that hot. But then I wonder, how great are temperature records in obscure microclimates in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa? // Records or it didn’t happen.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
I'm from South Australia, more specifically: Port Lincoln. Now look, I don't mean to sound like I'm over exaggerating, because I'm not: It gets fucking hot there, and then it will start blowing 40 knots sustained (74kph / 45mph), straight down the centre of the country, and then something, typically a national park, will catch fire. And that makes it even hotter. So hot houses spontaneously combust from the radiant heat before the fire front. And then there's Adelaide, similar latitude, just 250k or so east, with the urban heat island effect. Quite unpleasant. So yeah, we only know about the places the Bureau Of Meteorology keeps records for. There's probably some rural Australian grazier reading this going "55 degrees C? Heh, that's mild." I hear Baghdad is can get quite warm.
- geofft 6y ago
  Doesn't it need to get up to 300°C (the flash point of wood) for things to spontaneously combust from the ambient temperature? I agree with you that hot and dry conditions make wildfires much easier to start and spread, but that's been having an effect in residential parts of California over the last few weeks, where the temperature has at most been around 100-110°F (38°-43°C). (And I do agree that, metres from a moving fire, the temperature is probably past the flash point of many substances, but I wouldn't call that climate, I think.)
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    I'm not making this up. Heat from the fire reached 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), with speeds up to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyre_Peninsula_bushfire,_2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyre_Peninsula_bushfire,_2005
    - driverdan 6y ago
      > The source of ignition was subsequently found to have been a vehicle parked in grass on the roadside.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        Sorry, "spontaneously combust" was probably the wrong term. I just meant material will catch fire from the radiant heat alone, well before the fire actually gets there.
  - dwd 6y ago
    Rather than spontaneously combusting; in a large bushfire that is generating firestorms, the pressure differential can cause nearby houses to literally explode. My late uncle who was at the Mt Macedon fires during Ash Wednesday told the story of getting trapped by the fire and sheltering with another firefighter in a house that was ripped apart around them - they ended up sheltering in a concrete toilet block as the fire raged past. These type of fires create their own weather.
  - nl 6y ago
    I don't think (hope!) the OP isn't claiming spontaneous combustion. I'm in Australia (Adelaide) too and the bushfire threat is real, but it's because when it's super hot any spark in dry eucalyptus leaves takes off extremely quickly.
- dwd 6y ago
  Those 120-121F days last January that Port Lincoln round to Port Augusta got would have felt hotter than 130F in Death Valley due to the relative humidity. Just not the same.
  - nl 6y ago
    It's not that humid in Port Lincoln. The areas around it are extremely dry. Mumbai. Now that's hot and humid.
swimfar 6y ago
"The standard measuring conditions for temperature are in the air, 1.5 metres (5 ft) above the ground, and shielded from direct sunlight intensity" [1] Lots of people claim that their region/country has had hotter weather than the records, but I doubt the temperatures were taken in these more precise conditions. It's not like there aren't scientists and meteorologists all over the world (including Africa) who are measuring these things constantly. If you're standing on dark surface in a hot place, the air temperature can be much higher. "In recent years a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) has been recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measuring_conditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measur...
- stephen_g 6y ago
  Yeah, we get a lot of that sort of claim in Australia, where the conservative side of politics have made climate change a massively politically polarised topic (it might not be a surprising coincidence that a lot of the major political donors to these parties have made billions from coal mining and natural gas extraction). We have media commentators and even members of parliament (!) actively trying to discredit our Bureau of Meteorology, pulling up newspaper reports and people's anecdotes of slightly higher temperatures recorded decades ago than records that have been broken just recently. It doesn't seem to a lot of these people to be a good argument that 1) thermometers weren't as accurately calibrated then as they were today, and 2) an observed temperature at your grandfather's farm that was taken from a thermometer hanging under a tin roof that was radiating heat at it isn't up to the standard of the official figures! Anyway, so at the end of the day it's extremely controversial that the official figures have been adjusted based on measured deviations between the technology used at the time and the more accurate measuring devices used today.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Of course, they see it the other way around, that it's the non-conservative side of politics that made it polarising. That's the nature of polarity ;) The adjustments to the historical temperature record are an under-discussed topic IMO. Most people don't know they occur. The justifications are by the way not that thermometers were inaccurately calibrated in the 1930s. Thermometer technology is very old. If there are datasets being adjusted that way, that's a new reason that I haven't seen when reviewing this controversy myself. The justifications are, at least for the USA, more like: 1. A claim that people before the 1980s didn't know how to use min/max thermometers and read them/reset them at the wrong time of day. So climatologists have a thing called time of observation bias adjustment, which supposedly corrects for this. 2. Thermometers got moved around over time, so they apply 'homogenization' algorithms to invent readings for thermometer locations that no longer exist 3. Thermometers often had gaps in their readings, so again, they interpolate readings that 'should' have happened from nearby thermometers. Because the thermometer network is getting older with time, the amount of interpolated data keeps going up. For instance the standard US thermometer network used for all American temperature timeseries now has >60% interpolated data generated by a model, they're not raw readings, because there's been so much movement over time. The counter-arguments are: 1. It's unscientific to quietly alter your data to fit your theories. If there are doubts about the accuracy of the readings, you are meant to add error bars and incorporate that into your uncertainty, not just publish new versions of historical timeseries like climatologists do. 2. The historical justification for TOB existing is not very strong. There's an assumption that people back then didn't know how to use min/max thermometers correctly, but there's not much in the historical record to actually support this claim, which is an odd one because, again, thermometers are an old technology and people were making records of temperature for a long time. A min/max thermometer is not a complex device. 3. Putting aside the fact that again, supposedly raw scientific datasets aren't meant to have interpolated data points in them, homogenization might make sense in the USA where there was a large and well resourced thermometer network throughout the 20th century. But that's not true for the rest of the world, which was busy being wracked by multiple world wars, communist insurrections, 3rd world poverty and so on. Temperature data outside the USA for much of the 20th century is quite sparse and not very high quality, especially as people didn't really care about global warming until the 1970s/1980s. 4. Climatologists have continually adjusted raw temperature readings in new dataset versions even for very recent measurements, like measurements taken in the 21st century. These adjustments always strengthen the case for global warming, they never produce contradictory evidence. So there is a risk of a file-drawer problem, where now the precedent was set that adjusting historical data is accepted, people keep trying different adjustments with different explanations and end up discarding the ones that would reduce the perceived threat.
dx87 6y ago
I think you're right. Unless the thermometer was broken, I remember a couple of days when the temperature was over 130 in Iraq during Summer. It was just one of the cheap thermometers that looks like a big wall clock though, so I don't know how accurate the measurement was.
- taejo 6y ago
  A thermometer against the wall doesn't have free airflow, is typically higher than 1.5 metres above the groud, and may or may not be in the shade; all these will typically account for more error compared to standard conditions (typically provided by a Stevenson screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screenhttps://en.wik...) than miscalibration.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>I had 125 F - 135 F in my memory. These articles imply that’s not possible. If a tree falls in the woods ... Or, rather, if the sun heats your day in Africa but nobody measures it, is it not hot? As the other comment said, you measure temperature a certain way. No doubt in the sun its hotter than 130 degrees, but that's not how temperature is measured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen
aasasd 6y ago
When I was in Egypt for a week in April (not this year), it was 40°C the whole time in the day, without much variation. I'm guessing they must get higher temperatures later in the summer.
- Ozzie_osman 6y ago
  Where in Egypt? I lived in Cairo for 20 years or so, high 30s / low 40s is pretty standard in the summer. A mid-summer heatwave could get to mid-40s. Never saw it get to 50. In the south of Egypt (eg Aswan, Luxor), though, mid or high 40s would be much more typical in the summer and wouldn't be surprised at all if it hit or crossed 50.
tluyben2 6y ago
We had 48C where I am in Spain and that was ‘the highest on record’; I browsed back 8 years or so in Facebook and found my and my friends pics of thermometers pointing over 50C in the same place. You have make headlines somehow right?
- boudin 6y ago
  What's inportant is not the absolute value but the differences over the year when measured in the exact same condition with the same device for which error margins are known. It also just depends where this thermometer was. If it had been sitting in plain sun all day long and wasn't specially built for that it will always be at quite higher temperature the same way any surface can reach really high temperature.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    In the shade. No-one hangs thermometers in the sun here. But yeah; a house grade thermometer is not that accurate I guess. Thing is; when the heatwave (and hurricane after it) was at that time, it was so hot that people (and dogs) were vomiting (including me) because it was so hot (I am not from here and definitely not used to this kind of weather; I had the same problem when I was in India during a heatwave). This year nothing came close; neither on my imperfect thermometer nor the physical struggles.
  - jansan 6y ago
    > If it had been sitting in plain sun all day long Please, even the most simple minded people don't do this.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
tuatoru 6y ago
Meteorologists use a standard enclosure called a Stevenson screen[1] to ensure measurement consistency around the world. Or at least they did until very recently. There might now be some active-airflow alternatives. Anyway, if it isn't measured with a (calibrated) standard apparatus, it isn't an official measurement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen
- yummypaint 6y ago
  To expand on this, the thermometer itself will come with documentation tracing its calibration back to NIST. This applies to scientific instruments of all kinds. Not doing that is part of why grocery store thermometers are so cheap. https://www.nist.gov/traceability/supplementary-materials-related-nist-policy-metrological-traceability https://www.nist.gov/traceability/supplementary-materials-re...
vmilner 6y ago
On his "Sahara" trip Michael Palin measured 55C/131F (unshaded), at Tirelli in Mali. (Presumably he was there on a randomish day, rather than a record-setting one.) https://www.palinstravels.co.uk/book-2120 https://www.palinstravels.co.uk/book-2120
Shivetya 6y ago
Agenda. The US has records not broken stretching back to the very late 1880s and 1890s and of course there were a few hot years in the early part of the 1900s. Quite a few records are still standing from the 1930s. Still in the end understand every generation has doom and gloom weather prophets and today we like to bludgeon people with "scientist say this" but that was the case a hundred years ago to. record books are fascinating but better yet are finding archives of newspapers which are online for nearly every major metropolitan area. We seem to be a society hell bent on declaring our generation as the worst off and the good old days are long gone. and people wonder why they are are unhappy
- xg15 6y ago
  Sources?
- dr-detroit 6y ago
  I would argue the exact opposite that we live in a society where nothing bad can ever happen because that would mean the emprah would have no clothes.
- dada78641 6y ago
  The existence of higher temperature records from the past does not invalidate the basic science of anthropogenic climate change. It's the same with, say, the massive fires in Australia that were in the news late last year. People rightly point out that there have been large fires in the past too. That's correct, and no one is disputing this. People then conclude that, since there were massive fires in the past, there's nothing new about it and therefore the climate crisis is just pointless alarmism. That's totally incorrect. It actually has absolutely nothing to do with how dire the situation is. The thing about climate change is that what were once extreme freak events are now becoming commonplace. Extreme temperatures are becoming normal temperatures. Massive wildfires are far more likely to occur. Warmer oceans means more heat energy available for the formation of tropical cyclones. I mean, honestly, do you really think that the entire scientific community of the planet did not consider the fact there were extremely hot days in the past? If you want to ridicule the basic science behind climate change, you'll need to understand it first, instead of assuming you've found a loophole that invalidates everything that everybody in the world missed. The fact of the matter is that we're all in extreme trouble. So are you. So is everyone. It can not be overstated how bad the situation is. But rather than face that, people would rather choose to believe they're such geniuses that they can invalidate the entire scientific community's decades long work by a gotcha.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

I'm from South Australia, more specifically: Port Lincoln. Now look, I don't mean to sound like I'm over exaggerating, because I'm not: It gets fucking hot there, and then it will start blowing 40 knots sustained (74kph / 45mph), straight down the centre of the country, and then something, typically a national park, will catch fire. And that makes it even hotter. So hot houses spontaneously combust from the radiant heat before the fire front. And then there's Adelaide, similar latitude, just 250k or so east, with the urban heat island effect. Quite unpleasant. So yeah, we only know about the places the Bureau Of Meteorology keeps records for. There's probably some rural Australian grazier reading this going "55 degrees C? Heh, that's mild." I hear Baghdad is can get quite warm.

geofft 6y ago
Doesn't it need to get up to 300°C (the flash point of wood) for things to spontaneously combust from the ambient temperature? I agree with you that hot and dry conditions make wildfires much easier to start and spread, but that's been having an effect in residential parts of California over the last few weeks, where the temperature has at most been around 100-110°F (38°-43°C). (And I do agree that, metres from a moving fire, the temperature is probably past the flash point of many substances, but I wouldn't call that climate, I think.)
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  I'm not making this up. Heat from the fire reached 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), with speeds up to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyre_Peninsula_bushfire,_2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyre_Peninsula_bushfire,_2005
  - driverdan 6y ago
    > The source of ignition was subsequently found to have been a vehicle parked in grass on the roadside.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      Sorry, "spontaneously combust" was probably the wrong term. I just meant material will catch fire from the radiant heat alone, well before the fire actually gets there.
- dwd 6y ago
  Rather than spontaneously combusting; in a large bushfire that is generating firestorms, the pressure differential can cause nearby houses to literally explode. My late uncle who was at the Mt Macedon fires during Ash Wednesday told the story of getting trapped by the fire and sheltering with another firefighter in a house that was ripped apart around them - they ended up sheltering in a concrete toilet block as the fire raged past. These type of fires create their own weather.
- nl 6y ago
  I don't think (hope!) the OP isn't claiming spontaneous combustion. I'm in Australia (Adelaide) too and the bushfire threat is real, but it's because when it's super hot any spark in dry eucalyptus leaves takes off extremely quickly.
dwd 6y ago
Those 120-121F days last January that Port Lincoln round to Port Augusta got would have felt hotter than 130F in Death Valley due to the relative humidity. Just not the same.
- nl 6y ago
  It's not that humid in Port Lincoln. The areas around it are extremely dry. Mumbai. Now that's hot and humid.

swimfar 6y ago

"The standard measuring conditions for temperature are in the air, 1.5 metres (5 ft) above the ground, and shielded from direct sunlight intensity" [1] Lots of people claim that their region/country has had hotter weather than the records, but I doubt the temperatures were taken in these more precise conditions. It's not like there aren't scientists and meteorologists all over the world (including Africa) who are measuring these things constantly. If you're standing on dark surface in a hot place, the air temperature can be much higher. "In recent years a ground temperature of 84 °C (183.2 °F) has been recorded in Port Sudan, Sudan." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measuring_conditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Measur...

stephen_g 6y ago
Yeah, we get a lot of that sort of claim in Australia, where the conservative side of politics have made climate change a massively politically polarised topic (it might not be a surprising coincidence that a lot of the major political donors to these parties have made billions from coal mining and natural gas extraction). We have media commentators and even members of parliament (!) actively trying to discredit our Bureau of Meteorology, pulling up newspaper reports and people's anecdotes of slightly higher temperatures recorded decades ago than records that have been broken just recently. It doesn't seem to a lot of these people to be a good argument that 1) thermometers weren't as accurately calibrated then as they were today, and 2) an observed temperature at your grandfather's farm that was taken from a thermometer hanging under a tin roof that was radiating heat at it isn't up to the standard of the official figures! Anyway, so at the end of the day it's extremely controversial that the official figures have been adjusted based on measured deviations between the technology used at the time and the more accurate measuring devices used today.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Of course, they see it the other way around, that it's the non-conservative side of politics that made it polarising. That's the nature of polarity ;) The adjustments to the historical temperature record are an under-discussed topic IMO. Most people don't know they occur. The justifications are by the way not that thermometers were inaccurately calibrated in the 1930s. Thermometer technology is very old. If there are datasets being adjusted that way, that's a new reason that I haven't seen when reviewing this controversy myself. The justifications are, at least for the USA, more like: 1. A claim that people before the 1980s didn't know how to use min/max thermometers and read them/reset them at the wrong time of day. So climatologists have a thing called time of observation bias adjustment, which supposedly corrects for this. 2. Thermometers got moved around over time, so they apply 'homogenization' algorithms to invent readings for thermometer locations that no longer exist 3. Thermometers often had gaps in their readings, so again, they interpolate readings that 'should' have happened from nearby thermometers. Because the thermometer network is getting older with time, the amount of interpolated data keeps going up. For instance the standard US thermometer network used for all American temperature timeseries now has >60% interpolated data generated by a model, they're not raw readings, because there's been so much movement over time. The counter-arguments are: 1. It's unscientific to quietly alter your data to fit your theories. If there are doubts about the accuracy of the readings, you are meant to add error bars and incorporate that into your uncertainty, not just publish new versions of historical timeseries like climatologists do. 2. The historical justification for TOB existing is not very strong. There's an assumption that people back then didn't know how to use min/max thermometers correctly, but there's not much in the historical record to actually support this claim, which is an odd one because, again, thermometers are an old technology and people were making records of temperature for a long time. A min/max thermometer is not a complex device. 3. Putting aside the fact that again, supposedly raw scientific datasets aren't meant to have interpolated data points in them, homogenization might make sense in the USA where there was a large and well resourced thermometer network throughout the 20th century. But that's not true for the rest of the world, which was busy being wracked by multiple world wars, communist insurrections, 3rd world poverty and so on. Temperature data outside the USA for much of the 20th century is quite sparse and not very high quality, especially as people didn't really care about global warming until the 1970s/1980s. 4. Climatologists have continually adjusted raw temperature readings in new dataset versions even for very recent measurements, like measurements taken in the 21st century. These adjustments always strengthen the case for global warming, they never produce contradictory evidence. So there is a risk of a file-drawer problem, where now the precedent was set that adjusting historical data is accepted, people keep trying different adjustments with different explanations and end up discarding the ones that would reduce the perceived threat.

dx87 6y ago

I think you're right. Unless the thermometer was broken, I remember a couple of days when the temperature was over 130 in Iraq during Summer. It was just one of the cheap thermometers that looks like a big wall clock though, so I don't know how accurate the measurement was.

taejo 6y ago
A thermometer against the wall doesn't have free airflow, is typically higher than 1.5 metres above the groud, and may or may not be in the shade; all these will typically account for more error compared to standard conditions (typically provided by a Stevenson screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screenhttps://en.wik...) than miscalibration.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

>>I had 125 F - 135 F in my memory. These articles imply that’s not possible. If a tree falls in the woods ... Or, rather, if the sun heats your day in Africa but nobody measures it, is it not hot? As the other comment said, you measure temperature a certain way. No doubt in the sun its hotter than 130 degrees, but that's not how temperature is measured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen

aasasd 6y ago

When I was in Egypt for a week in April (not this year), it was 40°C the whole time in the day, without much variation. I'm guessing they must get higher temperatures later in the summer.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago
Where in Egypt? I lived in Cairo for 20 years or so, high 30s / low 40s is pretty standard in the summer. A mid-summer heatwave could get to mid-40s. Never saw it get to 50. In the south of Egypt (eg Aswan, Luxor), though, mid or high 40s would be much more typical in the summer and wouldn't be surprised at all if it hit or crossed 50.

tluyben2 6y ago

We had 48C where I am in Spain and that was ‘the highest on record’; I browsed back 8 years or so in Facebook and found my and my friends pics of thermometers pointing over 50C in the same place. You have make headlines somehow right?

boudin 6y ago
What's inportant is not the absolute value but the differences over the year when measured in the exact same condition with the same device for which error margins are known. It also just depends where this thermometer was. If it had been sitting in plain sun all day long and wasn't specially built for that it will always be at quite higher temperature the same way any surface can reach really high temperature.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  In the shade. No-one hangs thermometers in the sun here. But yeah; a house grade thermometer is not that accurate I guess. Thing is; when the heatwave (and hurricane after it) was at that time, it was so hot that people (and dogs) were vomiting (including me) because it was so hot (I am not from here and definitely not used to this kind of weather; I had the same problem when I was in India during a heatwave). This year nothing came close; neither on my imperfect thermometer nor the physical struggles.
- jansan 6y ago
  > If it had been sitting in plain sun all day long Please, even the most simple minded people don't do this.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

tuatoru 6y ago

Meteorologists use a standard enclosure called a Stevenson screen[1] to ensure measurement consistency around the world. Or at least they did until very recently. There might now be some active-airflow alternatives. Anyway, if it isn't measured with a (calibrated) standard apparatus, it isn't an official measurement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen

yummypaint 6y ago
To expand on this, the thermometer itself will come with documentation tracing its calibration back to NIST. This applies to scientific instruments of all kinds. Not doing that is part of why grocery store thermometers are so cheap. https://www.nist.gov/traceability/supplementary-materials-related-nist-policy-metrological-traceability https://www.nist.gov/traceability/supplementary-materials-re...

vmilner 6y ago

On his "Sahara" trip Michael Palin measured 55C/131F (unshaded), at Tirelli in Mali. (Presumably he was there on a randomish day, rather than a record-setting one.) https://www.palinstravels.co.uk/book-2120 https://www.palinstravels.co.uk/book-2120

Shivetya 6y ago

Agenda. The US has records not broken stretching back to the very late 1880s and 1890s and of course there were a few hot years in the early part of the 1900s. Quite a few records are still standing from the 1930s. Still in the end understand every generation has doom and gloom weather prophets and today we like to bludgeon people with "scientist say this" but that was the case a hundred years ago to. record books are fascinating but better yet are finding archives of newspapers which are online for nearly every major metropolitan area. We seem to be a society hell bent on declaring our generation as the worst off and the good old days are long gone. and people wonder why they are are unhappy

xg15 6y ago
Sources?
dr-detroit 6y ago
I would argue the exact opposite that we live in a society where nothing bad can ever happen because that would mean the emprah would have no clothes.
dada78641 6y ago
The existence of higher temperature records from the past does not invalidate the basic science of anthropogenic climate change. It's the same with, say, the massive fires in Australia that were in the news late last year. People rightly point out that there have been large fires in the past too. That's correct, and no one is disputing this. People then conclude that, since there were massive fires in the past, there's nothing new about it and therefore the climate crisis is just pointless alarmism. That's totally incorrect. It actually has absolutely nothing to do with how dire the situation is. The thing about climate change is that what were once extreme freak events are now becoming commonplace. Extreme temperatures are becoming normal temperatures. Massive wildfires are far more likely to occur. Warmer oceans means more heat energy available for the formation of tropical cyclones. I mean, honestly, do you really think that the entire scientific community of the planet did not consider the fact there were extremely hot days in the past? If you want to ridicule the basic science behind climate change, you'll need to understand it first, instead of assuming you've found a loophole that invalidates everything that everybody in the world missed. The fact of the matter is that we're all in extreme trouble. So are you. So is everyone. It can not be overstated how bad the situation is. But rather than face that, people would rather choose to believe they're such geniuses that they can invalidate the entire scientific community's decades long work by a gotcha.