My Dad used to tell of the summer of 1933 when he was nine years old. My paternal grandfather had given up farming that year and taken a job in Cedar Rapids, Iowa as a mechanic, moving the family into a small house in that town. In those days, of course, there was no air conditioning. Dad remembers fans going in that house during the heat wave, and as he described it to me many decades later, it just moved the hot air around some. Dad and his older brother found relief by walking a few miles to Indian Creek and spending most of the day in the sluggish water of that sandy-bottomed stream.
We had some hot summers when I was a kid, too, in the late '60s and '70s. I had Bear Creek, a spring-fed trout stream just steps from our front door, to cool off in. That's how things were done in those days. But I remember, whenever I complained about the heat, Dad would talk about the summer of 1933.
Now, we have people talking about record heat, invoking the bugaboo of anthropogenic climate change to cry that it's never been hotter. And it's true that this summer it's been hot, all across the nation; even here in the Great Land, we've had a warm, dry summer so far, although here that means highs in the low 70s, not triple digits. But no, 2024 isn't the warmest June in history. That honor belongs to the year of Dad's favorite hot weather stories - 1933.
A recent ClimateRealism Fact-Check June 2024 article addressed the climate science data unsupported claims by climate alarmist media that hyped phony temperature “records” (shown below) have occurred in June across the U.S. which the article establishes as being completely false.
NOAA has updated its Contiguous U.S. climate temperature anomaly and absolute temperature measurement data results through June 2024 with these results showing that the temperatures experienced this June were not “record” high outcomes as falsely portrayed by the climate alarmist media’s phony political campaign hype.
NOAA‘s June 2024 Contiguous U.S. USCRN maximum temperature anomaly data (shown below) clearly indicates that not only is there no established trend of increasing maximum temperature anomalies during the period starting in 2005 but also the June 2024 anomaly value (2.84 degrees F highlighted in red) is below the prior highest June value of 3.91 degrees F in 2021 as well as far below the highest anomaly value ever recorded during this period of 7.72 degrees F that occurred in March 2012.
NOAA’s Contiguous U.S. maximum absolute temperature measured data for the month of June for the period 1895 through June 2024 (shown below) establishes that June 2024 (84.61degrees F highlighted in red) value is only the 6th highest measured June value with the highest June value occurring in June 1933 of 85.91 degrees F
Even California, the state most concerned with climate change, recorded its hottest June in 2021 - but their hottest July in 1931.
See Related: The Sky Is Falling! Summer Is Hot, So It's Time for 'Climate Calamitists' to Wail and Gnash Teeth.
Peer-Reviewed Research Debunks Economy-Destroying Climate Change Claims
Note that the raw data for the charts and graphs in this linked article were taken from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is where the weather apps on your phone and computer get their data, so it's hard for climate scolds to easily dismiss this information. It's the government, so it must be accurate - right?
Right?
Anyway - yes, there have been hotter summers. This one is bad, but despite the crying from the legacy media, it isn't the worst, although we are technologically much better equipped to deal with hot weather than in that hot summer almost a hundred years ago when my Dad and his older brother were soaking in Indian Creek to beat the heat. If you look at the chart titled "Contiguous U.S. Maximum Temperature" for June, the nine hottest Junes on record are, in order of highest temps, 1933, 2021, 1988, 2016, 1918, 2024, 1936, 1394, and 1911 - six of the nine were in the 20th century, with five being before World War 2.
That doesn't seem to show much of a trend.
Add to this the fact (again, from a government source, and the Environmental Protection Agency to boot) that the air quality is better today than it has been in many decades, with specific pollutants dropping dramatically.
Nationally, concentrations of air pollutants have dropped significantly since 1990:
- Carbon Monoxide (CO) 8-Hour, 81%
- Lead (Pb) 3-Month Average, 88% (from 2010)
- Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Annual, 60%
- Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) 1-Hour, 54%
- Ozone (O3) 8-Hour, 22%
- Particulate Matter 10 microns (PM10) 24-Hour, 34%
- Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) Annual, 42% (from 2000)
- Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) 24-Hour, 42% (from 2000)
- Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) 1-Hour, 90%
So, yes, it's hot. It's summer, and it gets hot in summer. This summer, things are hotter than normal - for June temps, 2024 comes in at the sixth hottest on record. Not first. Sixth. And when fall comes, it will get cooler. Next summer may be another hot one, or it may be milder. Trends are what's important, and yes, the last few thousand years of data from things like ice cores show a warming trend. That's what happens when an ice age ends and we move into an interglacial, the one before this being the Sangamonian when it was pretty mild across the northern hemisphere.
It happens. It's not comfortable. But destroying our economy over the bugaboo of climate change will not, in the end, make much difference, except to make us all less comfortable, less prosperous, less well-fed, and less free. The data, again, tell the tale. They tell us that my father was right, as he usually was - the summer of 1933 was a world-beater, and it remains the hottest June on record. Not 2024. 1933.
