Can tree rings really tell us the earth’s temperature 1,488 years ago to 100th of a degree?

“…ONE WAY to see whether Earth is warming is to take its temperature. For instance: ‘2023 was the warmest year since global records began in 1850’ (NOAA). ‘The global average temperature for 2023 was 1.46 °C above the pre-industrial baseline’ (Met Office).

First quibble: How many reliable reporting stations were there in the ‘pre-industrial’ period 1850-1900? One claim says there were only 58 recording temperatures around the world, 45 of them in Europe. There is surely no way that genuine data for either ‘global records’ or a ‘pre-industrial baseline’ can be constructed from such flimsy evidence as there was available before 1900.

Second quibble: There are now thousands of recording stations monitoring the earth’s temperature, but is the data reliable? As TCW’s Paul Homewood has pointed out, temperature measurements must not be influenced by nearby airport runways, for instance, and there were many more specific conditions laid down by a World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report in 2014: ‘The environmental conditions of a site,’ the introduction explains, ‘may influence measurement results. These conditions must be carefully analysed . . . so as to avoid distorting the measurement results and affecting their representativeness, particularly when a site is supposed to be representative of a large area (i.e. 100 to 1 000 km2).’

Quibble two continues by looking at recording stations in the UK which are graded in one of categories 1-5, where 1 is the best. After a Freedom of Information inquiry last year Paul Homewood found that one of the sites often quoted as being the hottest of the day was in fact Category 4, which has a WMO uncertainty rating of up to 2deg C. He has reported many more examples.

Do not mutter too many harsh words about our increasingly unreliable Met Office. Over in the US they have realised parts of their network might have similar errors, so have selected the higher quality stations in the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN). This ‘is a properly sited (away from human influences and infrastructure) and state-of-the-art weather network consisting of 114 stations in the USA.’ The website provides users with interactive graphs of average temperature anomalies from 2005. Not one month shows any sign of warming.

Quibble three: Scientific bodies are making bold statements about temperatures in the remote past where weather happened without anyone measuring it. Tree rings, apparently, ‘have revealed that last summer was the northern hemisphere’s hottest in 2,000 years . . . the summer of 2023 was 2.07C warmer than the “pre-industrial” period of 1850-1900 . . . Compared with the coldest summer in the record, year 536, last summer was 3.93C warmer.’

These scientists are claiming that tree rings can give them half the world’s (the northern hemisphere’s) summer temperatures 1,488 years ago to within one hundredth of a degree Celsius. There’s worse. Copernicus is the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme, which has wiped out the opposition with a leap into the remote past. ‘July 2023 is confirmed to be the highest on record for any month . . . it has not been this warm for the last 120,000 years.’ This came out on a United Nations website which seemed to make the ridiculous claim that we know what the whole world’s average temperature was in July 117,976 BC.

If even this basic data is unreliable, the conclusion must be that we cannot rely on the endless pronouncements of rising temperatures to decide whether our climate is warming dangerously. The only other way seems to be to take careful note of what the weather is like around the world. Is it getting worse?

We now arrive at quibble four: every instance of severe weather is being taken as a Sign of Doom. NASA’s comment: ‘As Earth’s climate changes, it is impacting extreme weather across the planet. Record-breaking heatwaves on land and in the ocean, drenching rains, severe floods, years-long droughts, extreme wildfires, and widespread flooding during hurricanes are all becoming more frequent and more intense.’

So far this year we have had hurricane Beryl, Greek wildfires, landslides in Ecuador, heatwaves in south Asia, floods in Switzerland, China and Brazil, tornadoes in Iowa, record cold in southern Australia and possibly many more. After its first appearance on the media, each item is copied across the world as evidence. Science tells us the world is warming, media people argue, so that is why we’re getting all this bad weather. Obvious.

Quibble five: our earth has had bad weather for millions of years. We have been recording weather properly only in the last couple of hundred. There is no way yet of proving absolutely beyond doubt that the bad weather happening today is worse than anything we have ever had before.

If published temperatures are subject to large errors, and bad weather may really be nothing new, then just how worrying is the climate ‘emergency’?…”