Why warmer days in Alaska are not a sign of climate armageddon

It’s climate panic again. This time, under headlines such as ‘Baked Alaska’, we are informed that the most northerly US state has experienced ‘absurd’ temperatures for December. ‘In December when temperatures would normally be well below zero,’ states the Independent, the town of Kodiak has registered a temperature of 67 degrees Fahrenheit (19.4 Celsius).

‘In late December I would not have thought such a thing possible,’ a climatologist is quoted as saying on CNN. ‘When smashing a temperature record it’s normally by a fraction of a degree,’ tweets the Met Office, ‘not by 20 degrees. But that is what happened in Kodiak, Alaska.’ The subtext, as ever, is that this is yet more evidence of what some newspapers and TV stations have taken to calling ‘climate breakdown’.

Or maybe not. The temperature recorded at Kodiak on Sunday was unusually high but it is untrue to say that temperatures in this location would normally be well below freezing at this time of year.