Spring Heat is Upon Us, Legacy Media Reports

Like in 2023, though, this is turning into a farce before too long

Nothing new under the spring sun, it would seem. With Easter firmly past and the warmer months ahead of us, legacy media is turning from ‘horror winter’ to ‘we’re all going to die of “climate change”’ once again.

This is nothing special or unpredictable, and I shall barely mention a few choice excerpts from a long-ish ‘report’ on Austrian state broadcaster ORF’s website (my translation and emphases):

March warmer than ever before

Over the past few months, no stone has been left unturned in the climate records, with records falling one after the other. After the warmest February, March 2024 was also the warmest in since records are available [orig. Messgeschichte]. Globally, it was even the tenth record month in a row. The main reasons for this record flood are man-made global warming, but also the ‘El Nino’ weather phenomenon

There is, it seems, no need for legacy media to distinguish any further between these two, right?

Also, what happened to that huge underwater volcanic eruption in Polynesia in 2022 that, according to NASA, ‘blasted unprecedented amount[s] of water into stratosphere’. Since we know that water vapour is more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, we should be able to infer (short-term) cause and effect, shouldn’t we?

Needless to say, the word ‘volcano’ doesn’t appear in the piece. Instead, we get this:

It is therefore hardly surprising that March 2024 was the warmest in Austria's 258-year measurement history, according to GeoSphere Austria. The average surface air temperature was 3.4 degrees above the average for the period 1991 to 2020 [we’re all going to die]. The deviations on the peaks were not quite as high, at 2.4 degrees above the average, it was the ninth warmest March since records began.

Oh, look, we’ve taken an arbitrary period of 20 years (1991-2020) and defined it as ‘normal’. Then there’s the conflation of measurements arrived at by different thermometers, such as old-fashioned ones using expanding/contracting mercury and the more recent electronic/digital ones. And, finally, there’d be the problem of urbanisation, changes in where temperatures where taken (2m above ground outside the city limits), and the simple ‘factoid’ that, e.g., today’s meters take decimal changes into account—which was impossible to determine with mercury-using thermometers. Just sayin’.

And even if we blatantly disregard these things, ‘it was the ninth warmest March since records began’. This is another way of showing one’s biases and spin within one and the same paragraph—remember, it took a few lines to go from:

March 2024 was the warmest in Austria's 258-year measurement history…

to

it was the ninth warmest March since records began.

Please don’t ask me how these two statements, which I haven’t ‘even’ taken out of their bloody context, lend credence to the ‘argument’ pursued by whoever ‘created’ this shoddy piece of ‘reporting’.

Lest I forget, the term ‘El Nino’ appears four times only, once in the lede paragraph (see the above quote) and three more times in the closing paragraph, as if it was somehow a sideshow:

Greenhouse Effect and ‘El Nino’

The main reason for this wave of record high temperatures is most likely man-made global warming, but the climate phenomenon ‘El Nino’, which occurs every two to seven years, also plays a role. It leads to a temporary weakening of the cold Humboldt Current off the west coast of South America and thus to a rise in sea temperatures in this area, which also affects land temperatures in many regions of the world. The current ‘El Nino’ event reached its peak in December. It is now weakening, but its warming effect is only receding with a time lag.

This is, I kid you not, all the ORF’s Michael Mattern, a ‘weather journalist’, notes. No ambiguity or relative share of influence there. Nothing to see here, folks, let’s move on.

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Abbot Hörweg’s Diary, 1805-47

As some of you may remember, I’m a historian, and in my professional capacity I’m currently writing a book based on hand-written wanted notes from late 18th-century Lower Austria. I’ve obtained my primary source materials from Zwettl Abbey in the Waldviertel area of Lower Austria, which is home to a monastic community of Cistercians whose ‘forebears’ have been in the area since the 11th century. And, yes, I do have quite a few picture postcards of it, like the one below from 1963:

Go and visit it, it’s a beautiful gem. If you’d like to conduct archival research, I’m happy to put you in touch with the archivist.

I also happen to have the quite extensive (approx. 161K words) diary of one of its 19th-century abbots, Julius Hörweg (1784-1847, elected abbot in 1834) that cover the years from him joining the Cistercians in 1805 until shortly before he died.

I shall now cite a few choice excerpts (in my translation, emphases added):

Some general remarks on the past year. The year 1811 was one of the most extraordinary years that I, and people of advanced age, have ever experienced.

The preceding winter was very severe and cold; the thermometer recorded 15 to 16 degrees of cold for some months, but not much snow fell.

On the 9th and 10th of February there were thaws, and on the 10th afternoon at 2 o'clock the ice on the Kamp broke up, and in two days the whole river was clear. Later it snowed a few more times, but the snow did not stay.

The months of March and April were mostly bright, and some days were as hot as in summer. Around 20th April everything was already green in our area - Waldviertl - and the trees were already getting leaves, which never happens here at this time of year.

On 10 May, corn ears were already appearing.

On 14 May there would have been unbearable heat if it had not been tempered by a northerly breeze and such heat lasted the whole summer.

As regards 1817, Hörweg wrote the following:

The winter this year was so mild and light through the months of January, February, March and partly also in April that one could not really speak of a winter at all. The thermometer has seldom been below the ice point; and when even if there was sometimes a little snow flurry, there was no snow; the ground almost always remained thawed. That's why we didn't know how to get ice for the ice pit.

On 8 February a letter arrived here from Vienna stating that the weather there was already very pleasant, so much so that young hares and wild geese could be found in the area around Vienna, and that the stags were already beginning to shed their antlers, which is unheard of at this time of year. All the newspapers were full of this mild weather. In many countries, especially in mountainous countries, the winter crops were first planted in January and February, and the fruits of the past year were fenced in, because it wintered too early last autumn, and they could therefore no longer be brought home. It is also remarkable that during these mild winter months there were often violent thunderstorms with thunder, lightning and hail in Germany. They also often struck and ignited. In February and March there were sometimes violent storms with snow and rain.

But all at once it began to snow on the 21st of April, and snowed almost 3 days and nights in a row, so that the snow was 2 feet high; this snow would have been more than half a fathom high if it had not mostly melted from below, because the ground was not frozen, and then it also began to get quite cold. In spite of all this, there is not much to say about the snow here around the Stift, but at Pertholds, Langschlag and Carlstift the snow is so high that the hewn logs cannot be seen or found in the forest; therefore no one could carry wood, and those who did not have a supply or could borrow one had to hew together and burn tools.

But it began to thaw again on 25 April and continued to thaw so that by 3 May there was hardly any snow to be seen. But at Carlstift and Melon etc. the snow is still man-deep. The fine and warm weather, which began here with the month of May, lasted almost the whole of May.

Summer. In the night of 10th May we had the first thunderstorm here, but the trees are only just beginning to sprout a little. Grains and wine have grown quite a lot this year, but the wine was not the best. Fruit has also grown this year.

I could go on and on on. The word you’re probably thinking of is: presentism.

It is a curse.

Now, can we please stop panicking?