Is “Global Boiling” Just Political Roiling? Hot Cities Tell the Tale

First it was “global warming.” Then it was “climate change.” Next was “global climate disruption,” though this never caught on much. Now, needing to ratchet up the political heat, there’s a new doomsday phrase in town: “global boiling.”

As The Guardian put it this summer, quoting the UN’s secretary-general, António Guterres, “The era of global warming has ended and ‘the era of global boiling has arrived.’” Building on this, Guterres really got creative in September and warned that “humanity has opened the gates to hell.” (Funny, some said that happened already when we created the UN.) All this was, mind you, “after scientists confirmed [that] July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record,” to quote The Guardian again.

Such frightening claims are inevitably followed by arguments about what caused the temperature change. Is it really man-caused — or naturally induced? Or is it a combination of the two? Yet few realize, as the claims are so bold and so jarring, that the debate itself is apparently based on a misconception:

In reality, temperature measurement is so flawed that we don’t really know how much the mercury has risen. The issue?

Most weather monitoring stations are in heat-retaining urban areas; rural regions are underrepresented.

American Thinker’s Mark Adams reported on the matter Wednesday, citing information from the CO₂ Coalition. “How many people are aware that, according to the EPA’s own data from 1948 to 2020, a total of 863 weather monitoring stations—that is, 81% of them—have reported that the number of hot days has either decreased or remained unchanged?” Adams asked rhetorically.

He then pointed out that while urban areas occupy only four percent of the Earth’s land surface, they’re also precisely where most weather monitoring stations are. Given, however, that the concrete and asphalt characterizing such places hold heat, the question is: How much does this skew the temperature-rise data?

A new study, involving 37 researchers from 18 countries and titled “The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming,” may answer this question.

Reporting on the paper, website Climate Change Dispatch (CCD) writes that in “their latest report, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] estimated that ‘urban warming’ accounted for less than 10% of the perceived global temperature rise.”

“This new study, however, contends that this number explains up to 40% of the documented warming since 1850,” the CCD continues.

According to Adams, other researchers have drawn the same conclusion. As he writes, “The Journal of Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics echoed this concern: ‘Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850.’ And the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology published a study that reached a similar conclusion: ‘Evidence of Urban Blending in Homogenized Temperature Records in Japan and in the United States: Implications for the Reliability of Global Land Surface Air Temperature Data.’”

“Just to be clear, these three recent studies published in respectable peer-reviewed journals annihilate the IPCC,” Adams concludes: “They are all data-rich studies countering the claim that urban heat islands account for less than 10% of the reported global temperature rise. Instead, they argue that urban heat islands create as much as 40% of reported temperature increases.”

Yet there’s more. Regarding the first research I cited, the CCD further reports:

In a double whammy, the study also found that the IPCC’s guesswork when it comes to solar activity appears to have erroneously ruled out a role for the Sun in the observed warming.

When the authors analyzed the official global temperature data using only the IPCC’s solar dataset, they could not explain any of the warming since the mid-20th century — i.e., they agreed that the Sun played only a minor part at best.

However, when the authors repeated the analysis using a different estimate of solar activity—one that is often used by the scientific community (read the paper for more…)—they found that the temperature trends for rural data, for both warming and cooling, could largely be explained by the natural ebb and flow of solar activity.

The lead author of the study, Dr. Willie Soon of the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences[,] described the implications of their findings: “For many years, the general public has been assuming that the science on climate change is settled. This new study shows that this is not the case.”

My, where have we heard that before? Well, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit admitted the science wasn’t settled more than a decade ago — after being exposed for hiding data (2009’s Climategate scandal).

Yet the alarmist climate agenda just keeps chugging along. Just consider that the aforementioned UN Secretary-General Guterres said this summer that it “is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action.”

Translation: You must turn control over world economies — and hence control of the world — over to globalist pseudo-elites such as Guterres.

They are right about one thing, too: We can’t afford to get this climate matter wrong. After all, these puppeteers aren’t talking about simply tweaking the economy; they want to destroy the status quo and completely remake it. They don’t wish to just rearrange the deck chairs on the ship. They aim to scuttle it and construct a wind-power vessel that can’t possibly carry us all — and whose final destination would be the cold depths of an energy-deprived future.