UK's 40C+ One Day Heatwave is a Black Swan
Climate alarmist ‘scientist’ Robert Rohde has posted this graph on Twitter.
It’s quite clear that the record set yesterday, being over 5C in excess of of the previous record maximum temperature, is a hugely anomalous outlier. Of course, data which only goes back to 1973 is not really adequate to test this hypothesis, but let’s for argument’s sake assume that the hypothesis is correct.
Yesterday’s brief heatwave as measured at RAF Coningsby then becomes a Black Swan event. In this respect, it is very similar to the anomalous two day heatwave which occurred in the NW Pacific region on June 27-29, 2021:
Here is what I wrote at the time:
The red line is the maximum recorded temperature in any given year. The green line is the running 10 year average. Note that the series only covers from the period from 1950 (71 years). The green line is representative of the generalised warming in the study region with reference to maximum summer temperatures. As you can see, it’s of the order of 2 or 3 degrees C over the 70 year period to 2020, with annual departures from the trend line (positive or negative) amounting to no more than 4 degrees, the largest departures being negative values in the 1960s and 1970s. Then we get to 2021 and the red line jumps up 6 or even 7 degrees above the baseline! That’s huge. It just cannot be related to the observed slightly increasing long term trend. It can’t. Something else has to be in play, be it a ‘black swan’ extremely low probability event generated randomly or be it due to some very specific meteorological set up (perhaps amplified by other factors, e.g. land use, previous drought conditions), unique in the observed period.
So what’s the explanation for these very brief but highly anomalous Black swan ‘heatwave’ events, which don’t even qualify to be designated as proper heatwaves? I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s very curious. It implies that something has shifted recently, so that these Black Swan events become more likely. A gradual warming trend, even supposing it can be 100% attributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, doesn’t really cut it. Why the very sudden and very dramatic increase in maximum daytime temperature? Even creeping urbanisation and changes in land use doesn’t seem to explain it. Did the global atmospheric circulation suddenly flip into a new state, making these ‘heat domes’ much more likely to occur, further north than they have in the past? Or is there a more mundane explanation not involving physics or geography at all? I’m curious to know.