One of the reasons that the weather gets so much attention in the news is that it is a subject on which most people have the memory of goldfish. Or even without that exaggeration, that we have the memory of, well, people: Human beings live about eight decades on average. “In living memory” is a very short time in the grander scope of history.
We remember the weather of last year, maybe. And perhaps the memories of our childhood summers, or places we went on holiday. The unusual stands out in our minds, the normal fades away. This makes coverage of the weather a particularly fruitful area of the news, if you want to sensationalise your subject. We are also vulnerable to prejudices that we all hold about what the weather should look like: If you read a headline in a newspaper saying “Ireland to be hotter than Spain next week”, chances are you will immediately think about the weather in Ireland being warmer than normal, and not what often happens in those cases, which is that the weather in Spain is cooler than normal, making 20 degrees here seem scorching in comparison.
And so, in 2023, as we focus our attention on rolling coverage of the European heatwave, replete with footage of tourists bravely declaring that they’re drinking lots of water and staying in the shade, it probably isn’t widely remembered that in 1980, four years before your correspondent was born, the United States heatwave of 1980 killed 1,700 people, cost tens of billions of dollars, and was described as “one of the most destructive and lethal natural disasters in US history”.
Or we might not recall that twenty years ago, in 2003, the 2003 European Heatwave was blamed for killing 70,000 people in what was alleged to be the hottest summer since 1540. In 1540, if you’re wondering, there was no recorded rainfall in parts of Europe for seven months. Nobody bothered counting the dead.
Hundreds of years in between in 1757, Paris experienced what remains the hottest temperature on record when, on the 14th of July 1757, temperatures exceeded 37 degrees centigrade.
One of the hottest Julys on record, in our own part of the world, dates from 1808, when temperatures in parts of England also hit 37 degrees – we had nothing like it again until 1990, when the UK heatwave of that year saw temperatures matching those of 1808.
For the avoidance of doubt, this isn’t a cherry picking exercise: You can go back to the great burning of 1743 in China, where temperatures hit 44 degrees in Beijing (a record that has yet to be broken) and over 11,000 people died. Or you can go the well credited historical theory that periods of exceptionally warm weather in Ancient Rome contributed to political instability, as people and soldiers starved.
Heatwaves are not new. Nor is the theory that they are a punishment for the sins of man. Many historical civilisations were known to perform human or animal sacrifices to appease the Gods for periods of bad weather. Today, thankfully, we just put up the taxes on fuel.
All of this is to note that the coverage of the present European heatwave is predictably devoid of any of that context, and full of the most constant hypocrisy of the climate change activist – the notion that “weather” and “climate” are the same thing, or different things, depending on the necessary circumstances of the argument.
This is perhaps the most dominant trend in modern weather coverage: If the weather tends to contradict the climate change narrative – for example by being somewhat normal for an extended period, or extreme in the wrong direction, then anyone who utters a sceptical word about “climate change” will be sharply reminded by experts on television that “weather and climate are different things”.
If, on the other hand, the weather provides an opportunity to talk about climate change, then it will be asserted as fact that climate change is causing the weather. For example, the 2017 hurricane season was particularly severe, with a record number of storms. This provoked almost endless coverage at the time of the alleged link between climate change and an increased number of hurricanes. However, just two years earlier, the world had experienced the quietest hurricane season in years, and none of the years since 2017 have been especially severe – the anomaly got the coverage, the normal got no coverage.
Add all this to the capacity of humans to forget the weather in reasonably short order, and you have the perfect environment for media alarmism – a situation where almost every “extreme” weather event can and will be attributed to climate change, whereas long periods of perfectly normal weather get no commentary because none of us are interested in talking about the normal.
The media doesn’t generate clicks and eyeballs, of course, by covering the normal or by telling people the news is nothing to worry about particularly: It generates clicks and eyeballs by drawing you into round the clock coverage of a crisis. The European Heatwave is another example of that.
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