WRITTEN BY JOHN CARNEY ON SEP 8, 2023. POSTED IN LATEST NEWS
Fact Check: Is This The Hottest Summer On Earth?
Claim: “This summer is on track to be the hottest recorded on Earth.”
An article in Barron’s about rising food prices made the claim on Wednesday morning.
CNN’s headline proclaimed: “The world has just experienced the hottest summer on record – by a significant margin.”
You can find similarly alarming headlines from CBS News, the Guardian, and the Associated Press. [emphasis, links added]
Verdict: Misleading. Compared with most of the Earth’s history, this summer is unusually cold. The “record” referred to is kept by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization and European climate service Copernicus. It only goes back to 1940.
Researchers for the Smithsonian Institution surveyed the Earth’s temperatures over the last 500 million years. As you can see from the chart below, the Earth has been much hotter for most of the past 500 million years.
This study was not undertaken by climate change deniers. In fact, the researchers who undertook it wanted to prove how devastating climate change can be to life on Earth.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/fact-check-is-this-the-hottest-summer-on-earth/
