Where is the warming?
As I start to write these words, I am on my Manhattan balcony savoring a Friday evening. It normally is oppressive this time of year. Stifling humidity and sweltering temperatures relentlessly squeeze New Yorkers in a brutal vice. The infernal stickiness typically keeps it from cooling down, even at night. It is not unusual to wilt beneath 2:00 a.m. lows in the high 80s.
But not tonight.
After a mid-day high of just 83 and a dry, 81-degree breeze at dusk (headed for a morning low of 66), it feels downright autumnal. It’s Santa Monica on the Hudson.
It has been like this around much of the country.
While this delights most people, it must make the “global warming” crowd hot under the collar. After the severely frigid winter of 2013–14 (which shivered Americans coast to coast and even stranded icebreakers in the South Pole during the Antarctic summer), the warmists’ cute little theory increasingly appears to be on the rocks.
Consider, first, one normally blistering spot.
‐“Death Valley, Calif., which is known for being the world’s hottest location, maxed out at a relatively chilly 89 degrees on Sunday,” August 3, wrote Angela Fritz in the Washington Post. This reading, she added, “was its coolest high temperature on record for the date by a whopping 15 degrees. The previous record of 104 was set in 1945.” Local meteorological data stretch back to 1911.
Fritz noted that Death Valley’s average high in August is 115. “This makes Sunday’s high temperature a ridiculous 26 degrees below normal,” she marveled. Death Valley that day was cooler than Spokane, Wash. (which reached 93), Missoula, Mont.(91), and Boise, Idaho (99).
‐“THIS HAS BEEN THE COLDEST JULY SINCE 1967 . . . AND QUITE LIKELY THE COLDEST ON RECORD,” stated the National Weather Service in Little Rock, Arkansas. Communicating in ALL CAPS as NWS dispatches do, the Little Rock office called July “A MONTH WHICH SAW TEMPERATURES WELL BELOW THE 30-YEAR AVERAGE IN MUCH OF THE STATE.” Including those at Hot Springs Airport, Murfreesboro, and Pine Bluff, NWS identified 38 stations with record-low average monthly high temperatures. In some places, these readings began in the 1880s.
‐“Statewide this will certainly be among the top 10 coolest Julys going back to 1895 and will likely be in the top five,” according to Stuart Foster, Kentucky’s state climatologist. The Bowling Green airport last month observed nine days with lows of 59 degrees or fewer. Reports WKU News: “This is the most since July 1947, when 15 such days were recorded.”
‐“Northeast Ohio is in the middle of the summer that really hasn’t felt much like summer,” wrote Frank Macek for WKYC in Cleveland. Last month was the tenth coldest on record there. Cleveland’s daily mean reading in July was 69.3 degrees, “last achieved in 1920.”
‐*Meanwhile, back in the Big Apple, America’s premier city typically endures 15 days above 90 degrees and at least one heat wave, defined as three or more consecutive days above 90. So far, Gotham has had only four 90+ days this summer. The hottest day has been just 91, and there has been no heat wave.
“It doesn’t look like we have any heat waves in the near future,” the National Weather Service’s David Stark told the New York Post. The last time New Yorkers escaped such a scorching was 2004.
These milder temperatures have chilled business at local beaches.
“This is the coldest I’ve experienced in a while,” Ahmad Hussian, told the Post. His father owns Sun & Fun, a shop on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue. “Not a lot of people are coming here at all, but I have sold a lot of hoodies.”
The warmists, who concede nothing, hastily point to the west coast, which has been unusually warm this summer. Fair enough. So, as most people understand, conditions vary from one locale to another. Yet if so-called “global warming” — driven by rising levels of carbon dioxide — is truly the planetary menace that the warmists claim it is, it should not be so easy to find abundant evidence that things are going in totally the opposite direction. And never mind that CO2 levels keep rising, without the widely advertised, boiling consequences.
Satellites are far more reliable temperature gauges than are Earth-bound thermometers. Unlike objects in space, the latter can be affected by urbanization, engine exhaust, and — in the case of one university-based gauge — an adjacent barbecue grill.
“The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 213 months from September 1996 to May 2014,” writes Lord Monckton of Brenchley. “No one now in high school has lived through global warming.” This British expert on climatology and the political controversy that encircles it wrote for ClimateDepot.com. He added: “The fastest measured centennial warming rate was in Central England from 1663–1762, at 0.9 Cº [1.62 Fº] /century — before the industrial revolution. It was not our fault.”
Satellites aside, global-warming theory is driven far less by instruments that observe the world as it is, and much more by models that imagine how the world might be. Unfortunately for the warmists, their computer models have done a dreadful job of predicting in the past what temperatures would be today. Thus, there is little reason to believe that they suddenly will become accurate and dependable. One would be just as wise to invest with a broker who forecast a decade ago that today’s Dow Jones Industrial Average would stand at 25,000.
Along those lines, consider Obama’s comments from November 14, 2012: “What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even ten years ago.”
This is yet another of Obama’s countless lies.
Former senator Timothy Endicott Wirth (D., Colo.) allowed a peek behind the curtain. As he told The National Journal’s Rochelle Stanfield way back in August 13, 1988, when all of this got started:
“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue,” said Wirth, now the vice chairman of the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund. “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
How chilling.
— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.