Europe’s Record Heat Wave That Wasn’t
A viral graphic depicts news media’s use of red to elicit emotional fear (for average temperatures). Whether real or not, it’s a good illustration of the news cycle.
London and Europe Achieve Record Heat
This past week, London achieved a record temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Not to diminish the record temperature, but some perspective is clearly needed on this UK heat wave as the climate crowd continues to catastrophize (catastrophizing has been linked to mental illness).
The Heat Wave of 1911
In 1911, trees shed their leaves, grass turned to dust and cows' milk dried up. As the New England Historical Society recounts it The 1911 Heat Wave Was So Deadly It Drove People Insane. Temps hit scorching records, too:
Bangor, Maine had already suffered from two infernos, the worst fire in its history to this day.
The death toll in New England was estimated to be 2,000 people. Things were worse in Europe. In France, over 40,000 people died - including thousands of babies.
Today is Better than Yesterday
To put this into perspective, if this heat wave is to equal the devastation of 1911, Europe would have to experience nearly 750,000 excess deaths. While that data does not yet exist, Axios reports that only 2,000 people have died in Portugal and Spain. Extrapolated across the whole of Europe, this indicates a total of 25,965 excess deaths due to heat. We can look to the 2003 European heat wave where Europe suffered between 29,000 and 70,000 excess deaths, according to Science Direct. If that heat wave were to equal the death rate per capita, Europe would have instead suffered nearly 400,000 excess deaths. Thus, the 2003 heat wave was between 9.5x and 14x lower than that of 1911.
Then there’s the example of the 1921 heat wave as well, when co2 was more than 100 ppm less than it is today. What then could possibly explain how the world is getting better over time?
This kind of death from heat is unimaginable today - thanks to fossil fuels! Thank fossil fuels for your air-conditioning systems, insulation in your homes/businesses, and nearly the entire suite of modern medical devices and drugs used to treat you when you visit the hospital.
Survivorship Bias
Despite the news media having access to the same brain power and data I do, they have instead continued to spread fear and propaganda.
Consider that Bloomberg’s Weekend Reading delivered on Saturday, July 23rd, or Apple News pushing climate action this morning (Jul 24).
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb illustrates in Fooled By Randomness,
We will not get too involved in the Chekhovian dilemmas in the private lives of Marc and Janet, but their case provides a very common illustration of the emotional effect of survivorship bias. Janet feels that her husband is a failure, by comparison, but she is miscomputing the probabilities in a gross manner - she is using the wrong distribution to derive a rank. As compared to the general U.S. population, Marc has done very well, better than 99.5% of his compatriots. As compared to his high school friends, he did extremely well, a fact that he could have verified had he had the time to attend the periodic reunions, and he would come at the top. As compared to the other people at Harvard, he did better than 90% of them (financially, of course). As compared to his law school comrades at Yale, he did better than 60% of them. But as compared to his co-op neighbors, he is at the bottom! Why? Because he chose to live among the people who have been successful, in an area that excludes failure. In other words, those who have failed do not show up in the sample at all, thus making him look as if he were not doing well at all. By living on Park Avenue, one does not have exposure to the losers, one only sees the winners. As we are cut to live in very small communities, it is difficult to assess our situation outside of the narrowly defined geographic confines of our habitat. In the case of Marc and Janet, this leads to considerable emotional distress; here we have a woman who married an extremely successful man but all she can see is a comparative failure, for she cannot emotionally compare him to a sample that would do him justice.
This kind of survivorship bias is a pandemic of sorts in the western world today.
London’s Max Temperature
In what ZERO outlets are reporting, London’s maximum temperature was 81 degrees the day after, a more than 20% drop in a single day!
You read that right, the day after achieving a record-102 degrees, spawning thousands of tweets from climate “leaders” like Michael Mann, London was back down nearly into the 70s.
Michael E. Mann is an embarrassment to the scientific community. He does know better than to exploit a single anecdotal data point to present it as something it is absolutely not. He also knows that the single anecdotal data point is not linked to climate change.
Michael Mann, and others, need to stop being a Janet.
Virtually Certain and Low Confidence
That said, the IPCC is clear about one area of climate science - heat waves. The IPCC is Virtually Certain that there are more heat waves. However, the IPCC is also quite clear about other areas of climate science you’d think heat waves would be directly correlated to - like drought. The IPCC has Low Confidence that there are any discernable drought trends in Western & Central Europe.
It is true the world is getting warmer, but not for the reason that you might think. As Bjorn Lomborg points out in his book False Alarm, we are seeing fewer record-lows, not more record-highs. And that’s a good thing, because cold is significantly more deadly.
Conclusion
Climate is not weather. Today is better than a hundred years ago, and 118.26 ppm ago.
