Heat wave: watch out for fake cards circulating on social networks!

These maps compare the anomalies of heat to those of other years with supposedly similar temperatures between 2002 and 2022, or even between 1976 and 2022. Their goal: to make people believe in an exaggeration of climate change. According to these convinced climate-skeptics, the meteorologists exaggerate the coloring of the map by giving it an increasingly red hue in order to make it look like higher temperatures. In particular by an image claiming to compare two maps of 2002 and 2022, when it is in fact 2019 and 2022! If the colors are different, it’s simply becausethey come from different sourceswhere the codes colors differ! On the contrary, the temperatures between July 13, 2022, and July 17, 2022, when compared with the same color scales, do not give the same result at all.

The reality is of course quite different. Here is July 13, 2002 versus July 17, 2022 (same color scale this time).
STOP to disparaging messages towards our scientists.
STOP sharing without verification.
Really STOP. pic.twitter.com/NAiq6s69eB

— Dr. Serge Zaka (Dr. Zarge) (@SergeZaka) July 17, 2022

We are therefore a long way from manipulation of the media aimed at “simulating” global warming. Because that’s what it’s all about, large-scale warming. Hence the usefulness of viewing extended maps of heat anomalies. These false cards do not circulate only for France, but for all of Europe: another comparison juxtaposes cards weather report from Sweden which show similar temperatures in 1986 and 2022, but use a separate color code. Again, the TV channels that aired them are different, so the comparison loses its meaning, plus the years are, again, wrong. The same for the United Kingdom, where another heat episode took place in 1976.

We have not seen anything like it. We can’t compare this looming heat emergency to summer 1976.

A warmer world, thanks to human induced climate change, makes it almost effortless to break extreme heat thresholds. We continue to see this across the planet – not just in Europe. pic.twitter.com/z0FpZ3Mcbb

— Scott Duncan (@ScottDuncanWX) July 17, 2022

Many heat records in Europe, with over 40°C in the UK

“It’s summer, it’s hot”, Internet users claim. Yes, but the “hot” is breaking records, and breaking them more and more frequently. This is shown by a graph of recorded heat waves: they become more and more frequent over time. “Of course there have been heat waves in the past, but the big difference with 1976 is what the rest of the world looked like”said Friederike Otto in a communicated, Lecturer at the Grantham Institute for climate change of the’Imperial College from London. “In 76 there was a heat wave in (Britain), in 2022 there are heat waves all over the world and there were in 2021, 2020, 2019”.