BBC hype and a reality check: There was nothing remotely exceptional about the heatwave at Verhojansk, with the hottest summer on record way back in 1917.
Why do the BBC need three environmental reporters, when all they do is cut and paste the latest alarmist study without actually doing any cross checking or ask awkward questions?
A record-breaking heatwave in Siberia would have been almost impossible without human-caused climate change, a study has found.
The Russian region’s temperatures were more than 5C above average between January and June of this year.
Temperatures exceeded 38C in the Russian town of Verkhoyansk on 20 June, the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic circle.
The Arctic is believed to be warming twice as fast as the global average.
An international team of climate scientists, led by the UK Met Office, found the record average temperatures were likely to happen less than once every 80,000 years without human-induced climate change.
That makes such an event “almost impossible” had the world not been warmed by greenhouse gas emissions, they conclude in the study.
The scientists described the finding as “unequivocal evidence of the impact of climate change on the planet”.
It is, says co-author Prof Peter Stott of the Met Office, the strongest result of any attribution study to date.
Attribution studies attempt to work out the role that human-induced climate change plays in major weather events.
Climate scientists use computer simulations to compare the climate as it is today with the climate as it would have been without human influence to see how likely different weather events would have been.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53415297
As already pointed out, there was nothing remotely exceptional about the heatwave at Verhojansk last month, as temperatures were only half a degree higher than in 1988.
Now we have the full monthly data in, we can compare June temperatures at Verhojansk:
While last month was a degree or two higher than usual, we can see that it was actually hotter in 1912!
Meanwhile there seems to be little trend in overall summer temperatures, with the hottest summer on record way back in 1917:
If anything extreme was happening to the climate in Siberia, it would be immediately apparent in these graphs.
As is well accepted, the heatwave in Siberia last month was the result of loops in the jet stream, which brought hot air up from the south in conjunction with a large and fixed area of high pressure.. But there is nothing unusual about such a phenomenon.
HH Lamb found that not only did the same thing happen back in the 19thC, but that it was probably more common then:
HH Lamb: Climate, History and the Modern World- p 253
Lamb, Wahl and their contemporaries relied on meticulous analysis of actual data, rather than on the GIGO computer models used by Stott.
Strangely, while the BBC are quite happy to report Stott’s junk science, they omit to mention a study from the University of Exeter earlier this year. This conclusively found that the jet stream was not getting wavier.