This December for much of Germany and Central Europe has been a pretty cold month so far, with lots of snow and cold weather. At least that was the case until this past weekend when a warm southerly air mass swept across Germany and elevated temperatures well above normal, just in time for Christmas.
Yesterday, Christmas Eve, the mercury climbed to 18.9 °C in Freiberg in southern Germany – a new national record for the date. Spiegel writes that it was even warmer in Munich – but unofficially:
The thermometer at one measuring station at the university showed 20.7 °C. However, the German Weather Service (DWD) pointed out on Tuesday that this was not one of its official measurement stations. The reading measured in Munich will not be included in the official statistics of the DWD.”
Yet that didn’t stop the media from running with the reading as if it were an official record. Everywhere they reported the unofficial 20.7°C reading as a new record. For example online weekly Die Zeit here reported the 20.7°C reading as if it had been an official high (and good enough to qualify for the Die Zeit “Science” section):
With 20.7°C, a national temperature record high for Christmas Eve was measured since the beginning of the instrumental record.”
Indeed it would be interesting if a reader photographed that unofficial university station. Who knows what heat sources may be nearby. And I guess the media think that the German Weather Service can be just ignored nowadays.
Once again Die Zeit demonstrates an overzealous tendency of not checking the facts before printing, read here. No matter, the unofficial reading, which had never been accepted by the German Weather Service, was good enough for the broader German mainstream media to declare as the new record – and yet another sign of man-made climate change.
Record cold in Russia claims over 120 lives
Not surprisingly, much of the media refuses to report on the record cold gripping Russia, Siberia and large swaths of Asia, i.e. an area thousands of times larger than the isolated southern regions of Germany.
Spiegel, however, covers the massive northern hemisperic cold here, with an online piece titled: “Record cold in Russia claims more than 120 lives”. Read latest Russian cold here!
To be fair, Die Zeit reports on the record cold in Russia, but buries the story in the “Weather” section. Real propaganda meisters they are. I had to use their “search” function to find it.
At Die Zeit, weeks of record cold over a large swath of the northern hemisphere, with hundreds of lives lost, is less newsworthy than one unofficial record warm day in the city of Munich.
Best wishes to you and your readers for a happy, prosperous new year.
As for the cool versus warm question, both are consistent with and provide additional evidence supporting the theory of man-made “global warming”.