Expect more headlines about the earth being hotter than ever this summer despite wide temperature variations during the lifespan of our Big Blue Marble — in which humanity is just a blink — and despite the fact that we’ve only started measuring its complex climate during living memory.

When news reports declared July 4 “the hottest day ever,” readers could be forgiven for being concerned. Never mind that other headlines hewed closer to the truth by adding qualifiers like “on record” and “unofficial” for the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer on which the stories were based.

The Reanalyzer has aggregated and modeled “average global temperatures” from select locations since only 1979, some 13 years after the Lovin’ Spoonful’s hit “Summer in the City.” Yet  headlines that read “Unofficial Hottest Day Since ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’” wouldn’t have made a splash. Nor would ones pointing out the arrogance of presuming to set the earth’s ideal temperature.

It’s popular to say that “most scientists agree” that the globe is hotter than ever, but fact is not subject to a vote. We know that objects fall at a rate of 32.2 feet per second not because polls show an apple bopped Sir Isaac Newton. We know it because his theory of gravity can be tested and proven.

Countering the hype is peer-reviewed research, such as that by a climate scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, John Christy, which found “about 75 percent of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955.” EPA data show the 1930s were far hotter than today. 

Studies that seek to cool the alarmism and put our planet’s long, complex life in perspective rarely garner headlines, but the earth has been covered with glaciers for eons at a time and had hotter days before we invented thermometers 400 years ago. Today, the Sahara is a desert, but just five thousand or six thousand years ago, it bloomed.

Millions of years ago, the British Isles were tropical, and Greenland lived up to its name. In the 1990s, the island was cited as the canary in our global coal mine, but in 2021, Japanese scientists led by Shinji Matsumura published a study in Nature stating that Greenland has seen its “warming and ice loss” slow down “since the early 2010s.”

Research published in 2022 by a Niels Bohr Institute scientist, Julien Westhoff, and others found Greenland’s “summer temperatures must have been at least 3 ± 0.6° C warmer” during the Early Holocene Period. A 12,000-year-old Greenlander, from his long perspective, would find the island chilly today.

“Regarding the ridiculous claims of ‘hottest days in the history of the planet,’” the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, tweeted, “it is instructive to note that the planet Earth is more than 150 yrs old, 4.6 billion actually. And we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age today.”

“We have always been told that one record cold winter day is just ‘weather’ not climate,” the executive director of Climate Depot, Marc Morano told me. “But when a heatwave serves the climate agenda purposes, we are told it was just what ‘scientists’ expected. They are weaponizing every weather event from a hot day to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and droughts.”

Voices like these are often called “skeptics,” a word that has been whittled into an insult, but having a degree in science myself, I was taught that skepticism is key to scientific discovery and human advancement. Without dissent, we’d still believe the world was flat and the sun revolves around the earth.

A single skeptic can rewrite textbooks, such as the Australian, Dr. Barry Marshall — mocked by “mainstream” scientists for saying that Helicobacter pylori causes peptic ulcers. He turned around and proved his theory by swallowing a shot of the bacteria, a breakthrough that won him a Nobel Prize in 2005.

“There’s nothing more sobering,” the author, Michael Crichton, once said, “than a thirty-year old newspaper.” Headlines on the heat may get clicks, rewarding panicked voices with government grants and book deals, but true science seeks facts and tests theories so cooler heads prevail and we make good policy whether it’s a chilly day in Greenland or “hot time, summer in the city.”