Yes it’s scorching, but claims that the heatwave is down to climate  change are just hot air: June was even hotter when Victoria was on the  throne, writes CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
There is at least one thing about this summer of 2018 on which we  can all agree: the past months have unquestionably been swelteringly,  abnormally hot.
 And not just here in Britain, but in many other countries right across the northern hemisphere. In the UK, our own heatwave began in May and has continued relentlessly ever since. In 
Japan,  where one city claimed the highest temperature ever recorded in that  country, topping 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Centigrade), the  heatwave has been declared ‘a natural disaster’.
 Meanwhile, wildfires in Greece have killed at least 80 people,  leading to claims that this has been the worst disaster of its kind seen  in Europe since World War II.
 There have been numerous other claims of temperature records  being broken, all the way from California to Armenia and Azerbaijan  (although here in Britain we have not so far seen anything to equal the  101.3f — 38.5c — that was recorded near Faversham, Kent, on August 10,  2003). But more sober experts have raised question marks over the  reliability of these temperature measurements, because of the siting of  the thermometers which recorded them. In every case, it turned out, they broke the golden rule that  such thermometers must not be placed near heat-retaining structures or  surfaces, such as in the centre of large cities, near airport runways or  on Tarmac car parks. This is because their readings are then distorted by the  so-called ‘urban heat island effect’, which can exaggerate temperatures  by up to 2 degrees Celsius or more.
 One comical example of this was on June 28, when the UK Met  Office rushed to announce that the 91.7f (33.2c) reached at Motherwell  made it the hottest temperature recorded in Scotland. Only when it was pointed out that its thermometer was in the  middle of a Tarmac car park did the Met Office hastily withdraw its  claim, with the rather sad explanation that the reading had been  distorted by a ‘car left nearby with its engine running’. But all these excitable little mishaps notwithstanding, it has  certainly been abnormally hot. Above all, this raises the question: how  unprecedented has this summer’s heat really been? And, secondly, how  long was it going to be before certain climate scientists came round to  telling us that this was unquestionably proof the world is in the grip  of man-made global warming?
 At last this week they have come in on cue, with Peter Stott,  head of climate change predictions at the Met Office, and Rowan Sutton,  head of atmospheric science at Reading University, both making that  point loud and clear. As Professor Sutton told us on yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 Today  programme, thanks to climate change we can expect summers like this one  to become more frequent. And even if we curb our carbon dioxide  emissions in accord with the famous Paris climate agreement of 2015,  this will continue for decades to come. Perhaps it is time, therefore, to start looking at some proper  historical evidence in order to gain a more balanced perspective on what  is really going on.
 For a start, here in the UK we have the longest-running set of  temperature data in the world, the Central England Temperature Record  (CET), which goes back to 1659. And this shows that June of this year  was only the 18th warmest June in more than 350 years — the hottest  being as long ago as 1846. So this kind of summer heat is far from unprecedented. In fact,  as people have begun to observe, the nearest parallel to what has been  happening this year was the celebrated ‘drought summer’ of 1976. That was the year when, as older folk vividly recall, the  heatwave lasted virtually unbroken for three months, until rain finally  came at the end of August. And, according to the CET, those daily  temperatures 42 years ago frequently beat this summer’s figures hands  down.
 But there is another striking parallel between this year and 1976  — as there also is with that other heatwave summer of 2003 when the  highest single temperature ever recorded in Britain was set. In each case the cause of the prolonged heat has been a large  area of high pressure that has sucked in hot air from the Sahara (when  my next-door neighbour returned to Heathrow this week, she found her car  covered in this desert sand). This in turn has been caused and prolonged by a movement of the  jet stream (which dictates much of the northern hemisphere’s weather  conditions) because of cooler ocean temperatures in the Atlantic. This  movement has kept lower-pressure weather formations containing moister  and cooler air parked further out in the Atlantic to the north-west of  Britain and Europe. 
 
Sweltering
Although the causes of this cooler Atlantic are an entirely  natural cyclical shift, the global warming-obsessed Met Office became so  excited by that heatwave in 2003 that the following year it produced a  report based on computer models, called Uncertainty, Risk And Climate  Change. This predicted that baking summers would soon be so frequent that  by 2040 more than half of Europe’s summers would be hotter than 2003. But the same 2004 report predicted that by 2014, global  temperatures would have risen by 0.3c. In fact, during those ten years,  temperatures recorded by weather satellites did not rise at all.  Neither, until the past few weeks, have we seen a single summer to  compete with the sweltering 2003.
 We need to recall such facts, if only to remind ourselves that  there are those so convinced of their particular theory of how climate  works that they will leap on any evidence which seems to confirm that  they and their computer models are correct. Although there have recently been claims in the U.S. that America  is getting hotter than ever before, more than half the temperature  records for the 50 U.S. states were set in the baking ‘dustbowl years’  of the Thirties. Another 13 state records are even older. Indeed, only  two state records were set in the 21st century, at a time when — we are  constantly told — increases in industrial emissions are causing  dangerous warming of the planet.
 
Drastic 
On yesterday’s Today programme, Professor Sutton of Reading  University and his BBC interviewer agreed on how important it is that  the world should follow the Paris climate agreement by making very  drastic reductions in its emissions of CO2. What neither of them seemed to realise was that the much-touted  Paris Accord was no more than a wholly non-binding Western wish list.  Even at the time, the rest of the world — led by China and India,  respectively the world’s largest and third-largest CO2 emitters — made  no secret of the fact that it had no intention of reducing its CO2  emissions.
 In fact, buried away in the small print of the documents every  country had to supply before Paris, it was clear the rest of the world  would continue to build coal-fired power stations. China planned by 2030  to double its emissions and India to treble them, to keep their  economies growing. Despite all pretences to the contrary, Paris was little more than  an empty charade. But the good news is that this may well have not the  slightest effect on the world’s climate. We shall continue to have abnormally hot summers from time to  time, just as we did in 1976 and 1846, way back before global warming  was invented. Meanwhile, we can only keep praying for rain.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wor...-was-on-the-throne-writes-christopher-booker/