July was hot — no doubt about it. And media reporting on the heat wave was a raging wildfire of global warming hype.
But was it the worst-ever July scorcher, as the Washington Post, the Associated Press, USA Today, and others reported?
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According to a group of fact-checkers who dug through the reports, the weather didn’t live up to the hype.
In fact, the July “Media Climate Fact Check” turned around a Washington Post claim about July being the hottest in 125,000 years, headlining the report, “Worst Media Coverage In 125,000 Years.”
In picking apart specific media stories about the heat, the report provided to Secrets acknowledged the unusual heat wave. But it also cited two anomalies that skewed the data: the impact of El Nino and a two-day spike in Antarctica’s temperature that helped raise the so-called “global temperature.”
What’s more, it noted that since U.S. satellite data on global temperatures have only been collected since 1979, it is impossible to compare temperatures from 100 years ago — or 125,000.
“That heat wave was only detected and factored into average global temperature because of satellite coverage of the globe. But satellite coverage didn’t begin until 1979. So similar heat waves that may have occurred before 1979 would be unknown and not factored into average global temperature calculations,” read the report.
“So it is not possible to claim that July 2023 was the ‘hottest month in the history of civilization’ because such data does not exist,” read the analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate.
Those organizations have long urged the media to tap the brakes on the climate change hype, but news outlets have stomped the accelerator instead in recent years.
What their report aims to do is counter the most outrageous reports with simple facts. The July report cited 10 media claims.
Among them was a Washington Post article that the world was entering a “global boiling” period. The organizations said in their report: “Putting aside that the notion of ‘average global temperature’ is a dubious proposition, whether you believe the high-end of ‘average global temperature’ for July (i.e., the Climate Reanalyzer’s 62.6°F) or the low-end (i.e., Temperature.global’s 57.5°F), neither temperature is close to boiling (212°F).”
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The AP reported that the ocean off Florida’s southern tip was like a “hot tub” and the “hottest seawater ever measured.” The fact-checkers, however, noted that the example wasn’t of the open ocean but a very shallow bay and not even a record high.
And USA Today reported that the extreme heat was a top killer. “Every year since 2000, an average of 20,000 people have died from extreme heat in European cities,” the outlet reported, citing a scientific paper. The fact check mocked that story, noting that cold kills far more than heat.
