Listening to European media, you would be forgiven not to have noticed the news that in fact, globally, 2026 is proving to be a rather average year concerning temperatures.
Yes, Europe was far warmer than usual, reminding us of unpleasant years such as the heat dome of 2003 or the long lasting drought of 1976. But Japan had a rather cool, wet Summer (冷夏の夏、reika) while the North Pole saw its ice cover grow and the Southern hemisphere is grappling with relentless cold fronts.
The reality is that the climate is messy and in fact significantly becoming messier. The temperatures have been on a gentle upward trend for the last 200 years since the Little Ice Age. In the past, people wrote a lot about cold periods since crops failed and they were consequently painful (David Ricardo developed the Principles of Economy in 1817 based on these premises of rising prices.) but not so much about warmer periods in-between such as the Bronze Age optimum or the subsequent Roman warn period or the Age of the cathedrals. When traveling across the British Isles, here and there you will encounter Roman "Villas". Why on earth would the Roman build Italian style villas so far north, except for the fact that the weather was then hotter and drier than in the subsequent centuries?
But isn't the climate changing nevertheless? Of course it is! Except for the oxymoronic "Climate Change" trope, the climate is indeed changing as it has done for millions of years and will keep doing so for as long as we're here to witness the changes... and beyond.
What is nevertheless interesting is to see what's actually happening which no model prepared us for. I remember when very young, I was shown a minuscule stream in the Alps and told that over millions of years, this minute body of water built the immense valley in which I was standing. At the time, I found this fact amazing as I was completely unable to relate the two. Although of course, now we know the answer: All periods are not born equal. Some are quieter. This was the case of the 20th century. And some tend to be much more violent. This is more and more the case of the 21th century as we see small rivers raging downstream and carving valleys as just happened in Nepal and countless other places.
In the 18th century, a major scientific controversy erupted when we discovered the depth of time and the fact that millions upon millions of years laid burried under our feet. It opposed the catastrophists who believed that violent, sudden events had structured the world to uniformitarians who believed in slow, incremental changes. [Wikipedia] In the end, we now know that they were both right. The world goes through long periods of very slow changes intermitted by sudden, violent events.
With the jet streams meandering up and down more violently, we are having almost everywhere sudden burst of unseasonably hot and cold weather. This is not a bug but an indication that the Earth system is changing mode and adjusting to a new complex equilibrium that none of our models predicted.
We may see famines and droughts in the coming years, but although we will be told that these are the consequence of "Climate Change", don't be fooled, it will be the consequence, mostly, of wars and human disruptions. Do you know, for example, that in spite of the news about catastrophic fires in France of Spain this Summer, these fires do not even register on the global scene, dwarfed by giant fires in the Boreal forest of Canada and Russia which are themselves dwarfed by immense fires in the Amazon and the Congo? If we truly wanted to preserve the "climate", not burning these forests is where we should start. It would be cheaper and more productive than the elusive fight against carbon dioxide which is both meaningless and harmful for nature. (But this is another discussion altogether.)
Authored by Paul Homewood via The Daily Sceptic,
Greenland's icecap is melting away thanks to global warming, at least that is what we are told. According to the EU's European State of the Climate 2025 Report, the ice sheet lost 139 Gt last year. They say that is equivalent to about 1.5 times the amount of ice stored in all the glaciers in the European Alps, and raised global mean sea level by 0.4 mm. (A gigatonne is one billion tonnes.) Since 1972, losses have amounted to 5,747 Gt. The rate of ice loss has increased by around five times since the 1980s and is expected to continue increasing beyond the end of the century.
These amounts sound terrifying, which is of course the object of the exercise - at least until you realise that at present rates it would take Greenland 27,000 years to melt away.
I am always suspicious when 'scientists' present trends since the 1970s, a time when the Earth had gone through three decades of cooling and there were genuine fears among both scientists and world leaders about the return of the Little Ice Age. I am even more suspicious when I discover that official data about the Greenland ice sheet is publicly available back to 1840.
In 2021, a peer-reviewed study calculated the annual changes in the ice sheet mass balance since 1840. (The heavy black line represents the net changes, which is of relevance to this discussion):
The graph confirms that the ice sheet has been losing mass since the 1980s. But crucially, we can see that the melting began around 1900. During the period 1920 to 1970, ice loss was running at similar levels to the last three decades - this is hardly surprising, as temperature records across Greenland show that it was just as 'warm' then as now. In between times, there was a sharp decline in temperatures in the 1970s and 80s.
In other words, this is not a new phenomenon, as we are expected to believe. It is part of a much longer process, which began long before so-called man-made global warming began.
Scientists have long established, with the help of ice cores and other evidence, that the 19th Century was probably the coldest era in Greenland since the Ice Age. During warm eras, such as the Middle Ages, Roman times and earlier millennia, the ice cap was smaller than it is now. Any reduction in the ice cap in the last century must be viewed as part of these longer-term cycles.
Ice mass data is still regularly published and provisional data is now available for the year ending August 2026 - Greenland ice data is normally presented by "hydro-year", September to August.
Since the 2021 study, ice loss has continued to slow down and is back to 1920s levels. The 2025/26 season actually saw a small increase of 6 Gt in ice mass. Greenland never really had a summer this year. Whereas the summer melt usually begins in early June, cold, snowy weather persisted well into July. As a result, summer melt was around 200 Gt less than normal.
It is worth noting that the poor summer in Greenland was part of the wider jet stream setup, which brought our hot summer. While we had a summer dominated by high-pressure systems, the rainy weather stayed out in the Atlantic, battering Greenland.
6 Gt is of course a tiny amount, given the massive uncertainty in how these things are calculated. There is no way to directly measure ice cap changes; instead, the numbers are calculated from computer models fed with data such as precipitation and temperature. The experts accept that they can often be wrong by as much as 100 Gt.
Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that Greenland's icecap is doing just fine. It is still much larger than it has been for most of the last 10,000 years and, if it is shrinking at all, it is doing so no faster than a century ago.
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