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It is summer in the US and it’s hot, in case you’ve missed the news.

More than 100 million people, across dozens of states, have been living under heat advisories for the past few weeks, issued when temperatures exceed 38 degrees (100 degrees Fahrenheit).

While most Americans have got on with life and taken refuge in the plentiful supply of airconditioning (found in about 90 per cent of US households, more than any other nation except Japan), others have used the intense summer heat to make ridiculous statements.

On this score it’s a competition between Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The former US secretary of state last week blamed “MAGA Republicans” for the heatwave. “Hot enough for you? Thank a MAGA Republican. Or better yet, vote them out of office,” she said on social media, linking to a tweet that attacked Republicans for not supporting the Inflation Reduction Act

It's shaping up to be the hottest week of the summer for parts of the US as the country’s heatwave is expected to…

Meanwhile, Guterres said at a press conference in New York that “the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived”, declaring climate change “here and terrifying”.

The two statements were stupid in their own ways. Clinton was trying to politicise the weather, something no government can control over any measurable time frame. Guterres was simply being hysterical, seeking to use fear to garner political support for more “climate action”, which not coincidentally means more power for governments and “experts”.

That both of them, who privately must know their claims are absurd, feel confident to say such things reflects the depressing effectiveness of years of relentless climate change propaganda.

A 2021 survey of 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 across wealthy nations – the next generation of leaders – found 59 per cent were “extremely worried” to the point that 45 per cent said climate change affected their “daily life and functioning”, according to the Lancet.

These two comments came as scientists had confirmed July was the hottest month ever recorded in 120,000 years of history, according to the Scientific American and a deluge of media articles. That reliable measures only go back a little over a century doesn’t seem to matter.

Illustration: Johannes Leak.

Even assuming the “global temperature” can be measured accurately, an average taken over three weeks is meaningless. Indeed, a quick internet search suggests the 1936 heatwave in the US, which killed thousands of people, was at least as bad, and lasted longer.

Government institutions as much as the media are to blame for this propaganda victory, increasingly starved of alternative voices to report on and biased published data.

Earlier this month the International Monetary Fund quietly disinvited John Clauser, an American scientist who won the 2022 Nobel prize for physics, from giving a presentation on July 25 about climate change models.

From the perspective of climate alarmists it’s not hard to see why. Some junior bureaucrats must have alerted the organisers to Clauser’s sacrilege of a few weeks earlier at Quantum Korea, a science conference in Seoul.

In his keynote address he told an audience of budding scientists the world was “awash with pseudoscience”. Then he committed a cardinal sin. “I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis, and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”

Indeed, it’s already understood by the shrinking share of thinking people that the frequency and costs of extreme weather events have collapsed over the past century, as scientist Steve Koonin laid out in his 2021 book, Unsettled.

“The IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous disinformation,” said Clauser, who won the Nobel prize “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.

I suppose he – unlike Greta Thunberg, who is feted by global institutions – is not a proper climate expert.

Similarly, the US Environmental Protection Agency on its website shows charts indicating the frequency, duration and intensity of heatwaves in the US have been increasingly steadily since the 1960s. If it was a UN event, perhaps one could understand, given the IPCC is ultimately a United Nations body. But the IMF is independent of the UN, suggesting the cancellation was another pathetic example of censorship by a supposedly intellectual institution stuffed with PhD graduates.

But dig a little deeper on the website and one finds a “Heat Wave Index” going back to 1895, which clearly shows the heatwaves were more common before the 1960s, especially in the 1930s, before human-induced climate change was even considered.

These two recent examples of bias and censorship in relation to climate change merely pave the way for stupid statements by senior political figures.

As shown by the shocking fraud surrounding the origin of Covid-19, in which scientists privately downplayed a lab-leak theory in favour of the more politically correct natural emergence theory, the practice of science is highly political.

How many scientists “agree” with something in public is irrelevant to the truth, especially when the vast bulk of “agreeing” scientists depend on government agencies, such as the IMF, who insist on a particular narrative being presented.

Plenty of eminent scientists do dispute the climate Armageddon narrative but are ignored or ridiculed, in turn making it less likely that dissenters will speak out.

No one denies that the climate changes, it always has, for reasons obviously unrelated to human activity. At issue is whether how much of the change is our fault, and whether it’s economically feasible to stop or reverse it.

The only silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic was to show in real time how hopelessly wrong the so-called “scientific consensus” can be, whether it’s about the effectiveness of lockdowns, vaccines, masks or even the origin and nature of the virus itself.

Unfortunately for the world, because the climate changes so slowly in human terms, it’s much more difficult for the public to see for themselves the nonsense that’s paraded as “settled science” than it was during the pandemic.

In that context it’s even more important that governments respect a diversity of voices.

ADAM CREIGHTON

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 WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

.........AND MY HERO. ?