ANALYSIS: Are We Really in the Era of ‘Global Boiling’?

A heat advisory sign is shown along U.S. highway 190 during a heat wave in Death Valley National Park in Death Valley, Calif., on July 16, 2023. Ronda Churchill/AFP via Getty Images

News Analysis

An alarming message is being circulated widely: Because of human beings, July 2023 was the hottest month not just since modern record keeping began, but also likely since as far back as 125,000 years ago.

A similar claim filtered down to climate influencer Sophia Kianni, a Stanford University student and United Nations adviser who wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “it was reported that it was [the] hottest week in over 100,000 years.”

“This is insane and terrifying!” she wrote on July 26.

Earlier that same month, The Washington Post reported that July 4 “may have been one of the hottest days on Earth in about 125,000 years.”

Higher up in the U.N. than Ms. Kianni, Secretary-General António Guterres declared that “the era of global boiling has arrived” for planet Earth.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres leaves after participating in the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) Youth Summit at Quai Alexandra in the Old Port of Montreal in Montreal on Dec. 6, 2022. ANDREJ IVANOV/AFP via Getty Images

Satellite records show that July 2023 was, on average, a scorcher, likely breaking a record for that month and in absolute terms since the satellite record began.

Yet, in the view of climate skeptic Steve Milloy, the strongest claims about last month’s weather don’t stand up to scrutiny.

“We’re talking about the hottest day and the hottest month [in 125,000 years] and there’s no way that a sediment core or a tree ring can reveal that,” Mr. Milloy, who served on former President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, said in an Aug. 2 interview with The Epoch Times.

He described Mr. Guterres’s “global boiling” comment as “really over the top.”

‘Warmest July on Record’

Some of the core news that touched off the latest fears came from the European Union’s Copernicus program for Earth observation. It found that the first three weeks of July 2023 were “the warmest three-week period on record.”

Copernicus also predicted the month will go down as the hottest in the ERA5 record, which combines satellite measurements and other historical data to estimate global temperatures since 1940.

“All the reported findings from the Copernicus Climate Change service are based on computer-generated analyses using billions of measurements from not only satellites, but also ships, aircraft, and weather stations around the world,” a spokesperson for Copernicus told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 3 email. The approach to assessing temperatures is known as a “reanalysis,” a reassessment of older data intended to produce a gap-free view of the climate in recent times.

Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, seen by some as a climate change skeptic, similarly concluded that July 2023 was the “warmest July on record” with the “warmest absolute temperature (since July is climatologically the warmest month).”

His temperature dataset begins not in 1940 but in 1979, with the advent of the satellite record from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A lifeguard drinks water from under an umbrella at Rehoboth Beach, Del., on July 28, 2023. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

Mr. Milloy told The Epoch Times that April 1998 was “on par” with this July, in terms of how much warmer it is than temperatures averaged between 1991 and 2021. Average global temperatures that month were 0.62 degrees Celsius above that baseline, while average global temperatures in July 2023 were 0.64 degrees Celsius above it. By that same measure, February 2016 was even more aberrantly warm.

He said imprecision at temperature stations undermines efforts to make fine-grained comparisons on the order of hundredths of degrees Celsius.

Such tiny differences are “not measurable,” Mr. Milloy said.

‘An Unusual Month’

“July 2023 was an unusual month,” Mr. Spencer wrote on his blog. He speculated that water vapor blasted into the stratosphere by the January 2022 eruption of the submarine Hunga Tonga volcano could be a contributor.

“Water vapor is the largest greenhouse gas by far,” Mr. Milloy said, noting that the Krakatoa-scale eruption “is going to warm the atmosphere for a while.”

Copernicus’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, told CNN that the recent warmth is primarily traceable to carbon dioxide resulting from human activity.

At what point do we jump from comparisons across decades to measurements spanning millennia?

The Copernicus spokesperson explained that the 125,000-year claim derives from assessments in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

That document expresses “medium confidence” in the assertion that surface temperatures on Earth were last this high during the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago.

Climate scientists use various proxies to assess temperatures in the deep past, most notably ice core samples taken from Greenland and Antarctica.

Mr. Milloy voiced skepticism about those sources of data, arguing that Antarctic ice core samples may offer good insight into historic temperatures only in that region.

Antarctic Heat

Mr. Milloy attributed the aberrant global temperatures last month to unusually warm conditions in Antarctica.

A 'skier' LC-130 Hercules plane lands on a ski way at the East Greenland Ice-Core Project camp in Greenland, on Aug. 14, 2022. Lukasz Larsson Warzecha/Getty Images

“That heat wave was only detected because of satellites. So, before 1979, heat waves like that in Antarctica could have happened many times and affected global temperature many times, and we would really have no idea,” he said.

Ms. Burgess, co-deputy director of Copernicus, disagreed.

“July records are not distorted by any temperatures in [Antarctica],” she told The Epoch Times in a LinkedIn message responding to Mr. Milloy’s claims.