By Selwyn Duke

First it was “global warming.” Then it was “climate change.” Next was “global climate disruption,” though this never caught on much. Now, needing to ratchet up the political heat, there’s a new doomsday phrase in town: “global boiling.”

As The Guardian put it this summer, quoting the UN’s secretary-general, António Guterres, “The era of global warming has ended and ‘the era of global boiling has arrived.’” Building on this, Guterres really got creative in September and warned that “humanity has opened the gates to hell.” (Funny, some said that happened already when we created the UN.) All this was, mind you, “after scientists confirmed [that] July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record,” to quote The Guardian again.

Such frightening claims are inevitably followed by arguments about what caused the temperature change. Is it really man-caused — or naturally induced? Or is it a combination of the two? Yet few realize, as the claims are so bold and so jarring, that the debate itself is apparently based on a misconception:

In reality, temperature measurement is so flawed that we don’t really know how much the mercury has risen. The issue?

Read the rest here.