Hottest Day Ever? Nope, Just Fake News

The mainstream media is hyping the story that hot global temperatures in June and July, 2023, are the “hottest in the past 125,000 years.” That is fake news. Who was around measuring temperatures 100,000 years ago?

Let’s first look at the past 10,000 years of estimated temperature. The graphic below shows our current interglacial period, the Holocene. Physical evidence (from ice cores and rocks) show that the several previous warm periods were warmer than the current warm period.

From the CO2Coalition:

It was widely reported recently that July 4th, 2023 was the hottest day in Earth’s recorded history.

Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute stated: “It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial.” And, of course, it was reported that it was our fault due to our “sins of emission.”

This didn’t meet the smell test for the scientists at the CO2 Coalition. We know that previous warm periods were warmer than our modern temperatures. For example, during the Roman Warm Period there was citrus being grown in the north of England and barley was grown by Vikings on Greenland 1,000 years ago. Why aren’t they grown there now? It’s quite simple: Lower modern temperatures.

So, here at the CO2 Coalition, we did what scientists are trained to do:

We looked at the available data. Our Science and Research Associate Byron Soepyan reviewed temperature data from the US Historical Climatology Network and found that both the number of weather stations reporting temperature over 100 degrees F and the Maximum Average Temperature for July 4th were slightly declining since the record began in 1895 – not increasing – as Ceppi claimed. (source)

Finally we have a graph of the June, 2023 temperature as measured by the UAH satellite system which measures the temperature of the entire globe several times a day (source). The horizontal black line is the 1991-2020 mean.