Top climate scientists rubbish claims July was the hottest month ever

Two of America’s top climate scientists have rubbished claims July was the hottest month on record, deploring a “stunning amount of exaggeration and hype” surrounding the UN Secretary-General’s statement last week that “the era of global boiling [had] arrived.”

Cliff Mass, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington, said the public was being “misinformed on a massive scale” following a deluge of news reports that summer heatwaves in the US and Europe had pushed July’s average temperature above 17 degrees, and allegedly to the highest level in 120,000 years. UN

“It‘s terrible. I think it’s a disaster. There’s a stunning amount of exaggeration and hype of extreme weather and heatwaves, and it’s very counter-productive,” he told The Australian in an interview.

“I’m not a contrarian. I‘m pretty mainstream in a very large [academic] department, and I think most of these claims are unfounded and problematic”.

John Christy, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century were at least as intense as those of more recent decades based on consistent, long-term weather stations going back over a century.