In the Northern Hemisphere, we are in summer, so it is warm and … well, summery.  As we saw in past Catholic Candle[1] analyses, the world has been in a normal, cyclical warming trend beginning roughly 40 years ago.  This warming trend is only one of many that have taken place during the centuries.  The current one began at the end of that period (the 1960s and 70s) during which the leftists had been alarming naïve and gullible people with a scare that we were entering a New Ice Age.[2]

Those who read the mainstream media’s reporting know that this media is currently in full-alarmist mode about a crisis of the so-called “deadly” heat.  We do not deny that heat can be deadly but rather, we know that the earth is like that: there are places where the heat is bad (especially during a warming cycle) and there are places where the cold is bad (especially during the cooling cycle). 

None of that is alarming, surprising, or new.  Below, are some of the recent alarmist headlines (with red underlining added). 

Here (below) is the Washington Post:[3]

Here (below) is the New York Times:

 

 

 

 

Here (below) is the leftist The Atlantic Magazine:

Here (below) is the UK’s daily newspaper, called The Guardian:

The leftist mainstream media and leftist governments are so “over-the-top” with this “deadly heat” alarmism that they declare that the earth is “boiling”!  For example, the U.S. Government’s worldwide media, Voice of America, amplifies the United Nations’ propaganda, declaring that the “planet is boiling”![4]  Here is one such alarmist declaration:

The mainstream media follows right along, declaring we are boiling!  Here, e.g., is the U.K.’s The Guardian[5]:

We are now in a media landscape where the leftist climate alarmism is parodying itself!  There is nothing more extreme for anyone to use to caricature this mainstream media burlesque!

To mislead the gullible people that we are “boiling”, the mainstream media has been obsessed lately with some local or regional temperature being hotter than usual or setting a heat record, in order to give the false impression that the heat record pertains broadly to the whole country or the whole world.  This summer, the mainstream media especially tries to alarm people about the temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona.

But the mainstream media does not mention the very many other local and regional places which have been below their usual average temperature this summer.  For example, 2023 has been a cooler than usual summer in the U.S. Midwest.  The national mainstream media would never include that perspective in order to provide some balance in their reporting, because they don’t want balanced reporting or the truth.

There are such a large number of places in the U.S. which are currently experiencing cooler than usual temperatures, that the average temperatures in the entire U.S. are very slightly lower than usual despite higher-than-usual temperatures in some places like Phoenix.  Here is data from a University of Oregon climate lab showing a slightly cooler than normal average temperature for the U.S. as a whole[6]:

Let us look at the comparison of high temperatures this summer compared to prior decades.

The U.S. has temperature records for Yosemite National Park which go back more than 120 years.  Here is a record of every occasion on which a temperature over 100°F was recorded there[7]:

In the above graph, we see that the temperatures at Yosemite were certainly hotter in the past, especially in about 1914.  Does that mean we are in a “scary” global cooling now and heading to a New Ice Age?  No.  It just means that temperatures vary over the years and in different locations, and that it happens that in other decades Yosemite reached temperatures much hotter than are currently occurring.

Let us look more broadly at extreme temperatures in the whole U.S. by looking at three things:

1.    The temperature records for the whole nation;

2.    Which show how many locations there were with temperatures above 100°F in 1936; and

3.    Also, those records which show how many places temperatures reached above 110°F that same year. 

After that, let us see how the number of these locations compare to the number of such locations during our current year[8]:

From these maps, we see that there were so many more places with those high temperatures in 1936 compared to the present year.  This matters because it is one of many ways to show that the leftists’ present alarmism is not justified by reality.  Instead, the “climate emergency” that the leftists have declared merely serves the leftist political agenda of the ongoing globalist power grab (as we saw in past Catholic Candle articles.[9]

 

Even Assuming (Contrary to Fact) that Humans Caused Increased Warming, Would That Extra Warming Be Good?

Above, we saw the alarmist hype about the heat being so extreme that it “tests the limits of survival” (as one mainstream daily newspaper declared).  But we saw that the truth is that dishonest mainstream media “cherry-picks” the places that happened to be hottest at a given time and does not balance its reporting with the essential prospective that there are so many places that are cooler than usual at that same time (as is true every year).  Nor does the mainstream media inform people that the present year is actually a year of (slightly lower than) average temperatures overall (as shown in the Oregon State University Climate Lab data and the other data).

But let us suppose – contrary to fact – that North America or the entire world were really warming beyond the normal cyclical warming which is part of the normal patterns that fluctuate over the course of the centuries, the decades, and the months of a year.  Would such (hypothetical) greater warming be bad?

Catholic Candle readers might already know the answer to that question by remembering from a past article[10] that, in the centuries-long warming cycle called the Medieval Warming Period, the extra warmth was so beneficial that scientists often call this period the Little Climatic Optimum to indicate its advantages. 

The truth is that any increased warming has important advantages.  Among other benefits, this increased warmth saves lives because far more human beings die of cold than of heat.  On every continent cold is more dangerous than heat.

 

Even the data from the prestigious, leftist medical journal, The Lancet, shows that there are far more deaths from cold than from heat.[11]  Look at this graph:[12]

The Lancet is a leftist medical journal which adheres to the leftist claim that human-caused global warming is a “fact”.  But even The Lancet data[13] shows that (the supposed) “global warming” SAVES about 167,000 lives per year (283,000 minus 116,000).  Look at this graph:[14]

If it were not a lie that “global warming” is caused by man and by the burning of fossil fuels, then we see that it would bring about beneficial changes and would save lives for us to burn more fossil fuels in order to warm the planet to reduce the number of deaths from cold.  Yet, because such burning of fossil fuels does not result in any relevant temperature difference to the world, burning more of those fuels does not make any relevant difference to the climate.

However, the leftists are not concerned with the truth or with saving lives.  They are concerned with promoting their agenda to grab global power.[15]  Thus, in its 2023 study, Excess mortality attributed to heat and cold: a health impact assessment study of 854 cities in Europe, The Lancet publishes a deceptive graph which manipulates the X axis to represent five times as many heat deaths with the same length X axis as used for cold deaths.

Here is The Lancet graph (below).[16]  Look at the calibration markings on the left and right sides of the X axis (i.e., the horizontal axis).  The heat side represents five times the number of deaths as the cold side does, for the same length.  We added black ovals to this graph to show the location of this deception:  

Now let us reproduce that (above) The Lancet graph again, side-by-side with the same data with a non-deceptive graph, i.e., with the X axis which is calibrated the same way for both cold deaths and heat deaths.  Here is the graph:

We see that some leftists lie about the data.  See, e.g., “Big Data” – a New Version of an Old Danger of Manipulation and Deception: https://catholiccandle.org/2021/12/11/h/ .  Others distort the true data by deceptive graphs, etc.

So again, we see that warming will help save lives now and will benefit the peoples of the world, as the greater warmth did during the Medieval Warming Period, a/k/a the Little Climactic Optimum.

We hope this information makes the truth clearer that there is no human-caused global warming and further, that global warming is nothing to fear.  We hope this is also a salutary warning to not believe or trust the leftist establishment and media.  They do the devil’s work and spread his lies.  They do not serve Our Lord, Who is the Truth.

Let us watch and pray, as Our Lord told us to do.  Let us serve Christ the King bravely and willingly, which is the reason He placed us in these times.

Let us fight together, side-by-side, in the trenches of the Church Militant, for Christ the King and against His enemies.