The Problem With 'Extreme Weather'

Humans are a tropical species. It's between September and May each year that the real deadly weather occurs

Each year, the 23-degree tilt of the planet we live on causes seasons to change as it orbits the Sun. We also know that on top of this regime, heat is moderated, and sometimes intensified by particular weather systems, to create ‘heatwaves’. For most of history, people had no explanation for either seasonal change or differences between a season from one year to the next, or even one week to the next. Now we do have explanations for such things, yet some people are still surprised to discover each year that we in Britain, at roughly 53 degrees latitude, occasionally experience weather that some find uncomfortable. Even more remarkably, and despite these explanations, some people think that warmer temperatures are a harbinger of doom. They are ‘extreme weather events’, such voices claim, and they are ‘getting more frequent and intense’, and soon they will rip society from its foundations – just you watch. But what is ‘extreme weather’, and is it really capable of destroying civilisation?

The New Scientist proclaimed that “Europe’s heatwave is the hottest and most humid ever” and “temperatures in western and central Europe would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago”. The claim, of course, originated in the widely-debunked climate propaganda outfit, World Weather Attribution (WWA), which responds to weather events by being the first scientists to ‘estimate’ the contribution of anthropogenic global warming to such events. The problem is that “attribution” is not science, new or otherwise. It’s just games with computer simulations that codify their authors’ ideological presuppositions. Its purpose is to keep the climate narrative alive, with heatwaves supplying the never-ending plot with episodes, like some weird soap opera.

In contrast to such green hyperbole, meanwhile, meteorologists in both social and news media explained that the heatwave over Europe was caused by jet streams forming an ‘omega pattern’ (after the Greek letter), which blocked wind bringing hot air from the south, thereby creating a ‘heat dome’. But that explanation wasn’t enough for some, who needed more drama. Following the outbreak of a wildfire in Derbyshire, arch-Blobber Ben Judah took to X to ask: “Where is the Labour politician seizing this to explain this is climate change and this is why we are doing Net Zero?”

Perhaps some Labour politicians have now realised that such real-time ‘attribution’ claims are not science, and that anyone with a memory of, say, the 10-week heatwave of 1976, will see through such bullshit. Thus, such manifestly premature and unscientific claims are very likely to backfire. As Paul Homewood shows on these pages, claims about the ‘hottest ever’ are very easily challenged, and thus raise more questions about those that raise them than about what’s happening to the weather. But not all Labour politicians are alive to reality. One Labour MP, Chris Hinchliff in the House of Commons, stated that: