The below normal streak began on July 26 when Kansas City recorded a high temperature of 84 degrees, 6 degrees below normal for the date. The next six days were all also at least 5 or more degrees below normal. After a day just 2 degrees below normal, the area went on a streak of 11 consecutive days five or more degrees below normal through Sunday August 13.
Of these 19 days already in the record books, 18 were at least 5 degrees below normal, 7 were 10 or more below normal, and one was 23 degrees below the average high for the date. The Weather Channel’s forecast calls for more of the same–two straight weeks of sub-90 degree temperatures.
What is most impressive about this weather pattern–a pattern much more widespread than the Kansas City region–is how successful the media have been in concealing it. Even the Weather Channel does not talk about it. Were these temperatures running above normal in the same proportion, we would have had 18 95-plus days in the last 19 with 7 days above 100, and the story would have been in the news every day. The region’s three-day streak of 95-plus temperatures–high of 100–generated more media attention than this three-week streak.
Although the ideologues have adopted the phrase “climate change” and are prepared to attribute this weather pattern to it, they understand that glorious summer days in a region that is often uncomfortably hot this time of year do not generate much in the way of alarm.
Ordinary people still do not know what to make of “climate change.” “Global warming” they could understand but some time in the first decade of this century, alarmists gradually stopped using the phrase “global warming” and shifted to “climate change.”
For the record, at least according to Terry Anderson and Kurt Leube of the generally reliable Hoover Institution, the founding father of “climate change” was likely President George W. Bush. Apparently, in a 2002 memo to President Bush, Republican strategist and pollster Frank Luntz first proposed the shift from “global warming” to “climate change.”
Concerned that the debate was “closing” against global warming skeptics, Luntz told Bush, “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” Bush took his advice. He was unaware that the earth in 2002 was in the beginning of a 15-year long “pause,” now allegedly discredited.
Ironically, it was not the skeptics who would embrace “climate change,” but the global warming boosters. Having built their careers on alarmism, the boosters were not about to let the evidence derail them. If a generation of believers had to suffer anxiety as a consequence, so be it.
