Saharan heatwave ‘Cerberus’ hits Europe as tourists warned of deadly temperatures (msn.com)

Yes, the heat wave is named “Cerberus”.

I was thinking about a related topic the other day – it is only recently that the NWS began issuing “Excessive heat watches” and “Warnings”. In the more distant past, the NWS issued forecasts of weather conditions and temperatures but did not label weather conditions with superlatives like “excessive”. Now we have scary sounding weather forecasts that we did not have in the past which may result in people thinking the present is significantly different than the recent past, even though little has changed.

The warnings are based on a calculation of “heat index” which takes into account temperature and humidity.

The NWS did not used to label everything like this even though the same conditions occurred in the past. Beginning in 1995, the NWS introduced “excessive heat warnings”. Weather forecasts today are now prefaced with “Extreme heat” labels – whereas in the past, they’d tell us it would be hot and likely high temperatures will be something like 95 or 103 or whatever. The use of superlative labels, which is new, skews our interpretation of the event (and this is intentional). Further, we start to believe things are significantly different than the past – when they are not – only the labels have changed.

Similarly, the U.S. now has two related web sites: HEAT.gov (established in 2021) and DROUGHT.gov. We didn’t have these a few years back even though we’ve experienced similar heat and drought conditions in the past.

It is not your imagination that there are more “excessive heat warnings” – the NWS did not issue them in the past.

Consequently, media “noise” increases dramatically making it seem everything has changed in a short period of time, when the largest change is that we now assign scary labels to everything. What was once a weather report is now a named “heat storm” (the latest new terminology).

Wildfires have been and still are the most common natural disaster in the world; floods are the second most common natural disaster. We also have a government web site for floods: https://www.ready.gov/floods

The term “global warming” evolved to “climate change”, but today, has given way to the media invented term “Climate Crisis”, “climate emergency”, “global boiling” and other superlatives. “Climate” rarely appears in the news by itself – it is now a compound word: ClimateCrisis. Parody of news web service The Guardian worked with Columbia University and others to coordinate use of this terminology throughout the news industry.

Some “experts” propose using more harsh terminology. When facts and logic fail to be persuasive, they turn to propaganda techniques of ever scarier terminology – to the point it becomes cartoonish and no longer believable.

Illustration – rather than presenting facts and logic, this recent published paper argues for the use of emotional and artistic approaches to climate communications – once you go there, though, you are a propagandist and no longer engaged in scientific discovery and communication – but persuasion.

The Media Went Nut – Misleadingly Reporting land surface temps as implied air temps

It is hot, but this is absurd: Land temperatures in Spain surpass 60C as deadly heatwave sweeps Europe (msn.com)

Normally, weather services and news report air temperatures. But now they are reporting land temperatures, which are new for most people, so we have no way to intuitively compare these temperatures to the past. It uses a propaganda technique called “Anchoring” – which is to say, it “anchors” your thinking about a 60 degree C temperature, which many will confuse with air temperature. The story teller does note this temperature should not be confused with air temperature (duh!) In fact, as I measured at my own home, a land surface temperature of 60 deg C is very normal.

However, a majority of news readers read only headlines of stories, and will remember the headline and not know that this headline land temperature is completely normal.

UPDATE: On July 18th, ESA issued a correction to note that air temperature and surface temperatures are not the same.  They issued this correction after the media went full stupid.

This image uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s radiometer instrument and shows the land surface temperature in the morning of 17 July 2023 during a heatwave. It is worth noting the difference between air temperature and land-surface temperature. Air temperature, given in our daily weather forecasts, is a measure of how hot the air is above the ground. Land-surface temperature instead is a measure of how hot the actual surface feels to the touch. This map shows the temperature of the land’s surface which is hotter than the temperature of the air.

ESA – Temperature of the surface of the land 17 July 2023

The original report by ESA confusingly intermixed air temperatures with land temperatures, estimated from satellite observations. But to their credit, later in their press release they did clarify the difference – but many reporters did not get the memo.

We know that it was very hot, that daily record temperature records were hit in many locations, and an estimate, based on a forecast in early July, projected “hottest ever” average temperature of the earth. But that was a modeled estimate, not based on actual temperature measurements. Time will tell of actual measurements confirm the forecast – forecasts can often be wrong, sometimes close, sometimes not.

While tempting to extrapolate our local weather to “this must be the entire world”:  “June wasn’t the hottest everywhere, in fact  It was cooler than normal in a few places including over western Australia, the western United States, and western Russia.”