You may have seen it by now. National Geography and every major channel scream:
“2024 was the hottest year ever and the coldest year of your life.”
This is a clever psychological framework: arousing fear and inevitability in one sentence. However, it only works if you ignore context and history. [emphasis, links added]
These headlines are not scientific conclusions. They are marketing slogans designed to strengthen the narrative: today’s warming is not only unusual, but unprecedented, and therefore disastrous.
This statement crashes when you ask a simple question:
Compared with what?
To keep the climate panic engines running, the hottest panic must be declared every year, each anomaly must be historically significant, and each event must be framed as a proof of extreme climate deterioration.
It has nothing to do with science, but to keep the fantasy of crisis to prove more money, more control and more censorship of viewpoints.
I have unraveled this manipulation in past articles. For example, in this critique of the 125,000 claim, I decompose the absurdity of comparing the satellite-era temperature with smooth, agent-based estimates from deep.
This is similar to measuring body temperature to two decimal points and stacking it in someone’s fuzzy approximations that are derived from the basic sketch.
In another post, I explained how to “splice” modern temperature data into an older reconstruction, creating artificial jumps that make it look hot right now.
Real skills? Older data smooths it into plane lines, while modern data retains all variability. This is not science…it is pseudoscientific graphic design.
Finally, in my analysis of smoothing, I show how this methodology eliminates significant fluctuations in natural climate variability throughout the Holocene. The smoother you used to be, the more terrifying it looks now.
These works lay the foundation for what really happened: Create climate alerts with statistical techniques.
Why the “Hotest Year of All Time” narrative needs to eliminate the past
To see climate change as a threat, warming must be portrayed not only as rapid but also as Unprecedented.
This is why every temperature record today is not measured against a complete climate history, but against a narrow window of the industrial age, about 1850.
Conveniently, that's [start date] Also with Little Ice Ageone of the coldest extensions of the Holocene.
What is omitted are warm periods that occurred before, including the Holocene Heat Maximum (HTM) that occurred 9,000 to 5,000 years ago.
During this period, Despite pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels, most of the northern hemisphere are much warmer than today.
We know this is because:
- Glaciers are retreating and revealing ancient forests In the Canadian Rockies, carbon years were only 5,000 years ago.
- Bronze Age artifacts are being recovered from melting alpine ice The mountains throughout Europe, especially in Norway, Austria and Switzerland. Archaeologists have discovered weapons, clothing, tools, and even wooden skis, dating back thousands of years, many of which began in the Bronze Age or earlier. These findings suggest that humans often travel through high-altitude passes buried under ice today, apparently ice-free throughout the warmer periods of the Holocene.
- Reconstruction of dozens of peer reviews In Europe, Asia and the Arctic, displaying extensive warming.
These observations are nothing new, but they are often omitted from climate reports and media reports because they contradict the core message: modern warming is a unique danger.
If you want to see a complete list of research and evidence, I'll go all in detail about the deep dive linked above.
Then why be silent?
It's an uncomfortable fact: if the public is presented with a clear picture of past climates, especially the maximum of Holocene heat, the entire narrative of unprecedented warming will collapse.
Because if the world before almost every land surface was warmer, the current warming must be understood in a different way.
And if warming is no exception, it will not be automatically disastrous. This undermines the premise of net zero policy, climate emergency statements, and the ongoing relevance of the IPCC itself.
This brings us two powerful new peer-reviewed studies, each strengthening the wide range of Holocene warm reality.
One reconstructs land temperatures throughout Africa through multiple agents; others analysed an 8,000-year-old oyster shell to estimate ancient sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
Together they have a blow to the idea that modern warming is unusual or shocking.
Mainstream media won't touch them, and IPCC will almost certainly ignore them.
Irrational Fear is written by climatologist Dr. Matthew Wielicki and has been supported by readers. If you value what you read here, consider subscribing to and supporting the work there.
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