Thank God for the Guardian website. Without it I would never have known that I have been marching through a killer heatwave. For the past couple of weeks I have been quite happily carrying a 15 kilo rucksack over Alpine passes, walking the GR 5 trail which leads from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean. So, too, have plenty of others. Around Mont Blanc the path was positively crowded, remarkably with Chinese hikers. It has been hot work at times, though there is a good way to counter that: with a ‘chapeau d’eau’ – fill your sunhat with water from a tumbling stream and then put it back on your head. The biggest meteorological hazard, though, was a hailstorm, which was like being pelted with golf balls for half an hour.
But no, it never occurred to me that me that I have been walking through a ‘record heatwave’, linked, of course, to the ‘climate crisis’. Record June temperatures have apparently been recorded in Spain and Portugal – on 30 June. Had they occurred a few hours later they would have been July temperatures and shown up as nothing special.
In the case of France, the ‘record’ seems to amount to an unprecedented number of departments choosing to close schools because of the heat – not a credible piece of scientific data, more a reflection of changing bureaucratic attitudes to the weather.
In Britain, too, there have been reports of ‘record’ temperatures, although the maximum recorded this week has been more than 2 celsius below the record for June, and nothing special for the time of year. The one ‘record’ which seems to stand up is the highest temperature recorded on an opening day of Wimbledon. This means next to nothing, not least because the date the tournament starts was advanced by a week several years ago, somewhat increasing the likelihood of high temperatures.
One thing which has caused some excitement in recent days has been the temperature at the summit of Mont Blanc, which has been reported in some places as having climbed above freezing for the first time in June (again on the last day of the month). Actually, there is no weather station at the summit – I know because I have been there. In fact, there is not even a cairn. The record reported this week refers to theoretical temperature measurements obtained by isotherms – put simply, the freezing point in the Mont Blanc area was calculated to be a little over 5,000 metres, 200 metres above the summit.
No, Mont Blanc has not suddenly been taken out of the deep freeze
There is, however, a weather station on the Col Major, which stands at 4,750 metres, 60 metres below the summit. And that, it turns out, has recorded temperatures in excess of 0 Celsius in June on many occasions. On 18 June 2022 the temperature there reached 10.4 Celsius. In June 2019, 6.8 Celsius was recorded.
So no, Mont Blanc has not suddenly been taken out of the deep freeze. The mountain has a capricious climate which tends to result in quite dramatic temperature swings. None of this is to say, of course, that global temperatures are not rising, but much of what you have read this week is nothing more than catastrophising the weather for political reasons. Any hot day now is used as a vehicle by the climate alarmist brigade to spread fear and attack what a Guardian leader this week decried as an attempt by the ‘populist right’ to undermine net zero targets. The paper seemed to forget that much of the attack on inflexible net zero targets currently is coming from trade unions, who can see they are destroying jobs for no net gain. A few days of hot weather does not undermine their case nor that of other critics of net zero.
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