On: 'Hotter and hotter and hotter' - Europe's new climate in seven charts

July 4, 2026

Seven charts. I want to see them not as pictures but as instruments - each one a constructed lens with its own focal length and its own characteristic distortion. Before I engage with the claim that Europe’s climate is “hotter and hotter,” I must ask: whose thermometers, stationed where, read by what protocol, over what span of years? A temperature series drawn from Paris observatory readings taken at dawn in 1830 cannot be spliced seamlessly onto one taken by automated sensors at noon in 2020 and presented as a continuous thread. The join is where the lie creeps in - or, more charitably, where the uncertainty does.

The phrase “records were smashed” sets my teeth on edge. A record is only as meaningful as the baseline against which it is measured, and the baseline is only as trustworthy as the oldest entries in the catalogue. Were those June temperatures compared against a homogeneous record, or against one patched together from stations that moved, instruments that were recalibrated, observers who changed? I have spent enough nights with a micrometer that drifts with the temperature of the room to know that the instrument and the thing it measures are not separable problems.

What I find more honest than the charts themselves is what they omit. The gaps - stations not yet established, decades not yet instrumented, regions where the record is thin - these are the true map. Seven charts that show only what was measured teach less than one honest chart showing what was not.

And “a sign of things to come” is a prediction, which is not a measurement. I will reserve judgment until I see the provenance.