by John Carney, Breitbart:
Claim: “This summer is on track to be the hottest recorded on Earth.”
An article in Barron’s about rising food prices made the claim on Wednesday morning.
CNN’s headline proclaimed: “The world has just experienced the hottest summer on record – by a significant margin.”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
You can find similarly alarming headlines from CBS News, the Guardian, and the Associated Press.
Verdict: Misleading. Compared with most of the earth’s history, this summer is unusually cold. The “record” referred to is kept by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization and European climate service Copernicus. It goes back only to 1940.
Researchers for the Smithsonian Institution surveyed the earth’s temperatures over the last 500 million years. As you can see from the chart below, the earth has been much hotter for most of the past 500 million years.
This study was not undertaken by climate change deniers. In fact, the researchers who undertook it wanted to prove how devastating climate change can be to life on earth.
“The two researchers also thought a temperature curve could counter climate contrarians’ claim that global warming is no concern because Earth was much hotter millions of years ago. Wing and Huber wanted to show the reality of ancient temperature extremes—and how rapid shifts between them have led to mass extinctions. Abrupt climate changes, Wing says, ‘have catastrophic side effects that are really hard to adapt to,’” the Smithsonian wrote in 2019.
