While pondering the hysteria around the heat in late May this year I noticed several claims that Europe is the continent which is heating faster than any other. If you search online, you will find the claim being made in lots of places, but one such will suffice for current purposes:

Europe is the fastest-warming continent, warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

That’s from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, so I suppose we can regard it as a pretty definitive statement.

On reading it, however, I felt confident that I have read numerous similar claims about other parts of the world, and on checking, it seems I was right.

Here’s the United Nations telling us that “Asia is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world”.

WWF assures us that “Warming in Brazil is already higher than the global average”.

Reuters is confident that:

Australia temperatures rising faster than rest of the world: official report.

Back with WWF again we also learn that we have to ask “Why is the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet?”

Wikipedia assures us that “Africa is currently warming faster than the rest of the world on average.” Its source for the claim is a WMO report, so I suppose that’s authoritative too.

The Guardian warns that “South pole warming three times faster than rest of the world, our research shows”.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency asserts that “The United States is expected to continue to warm faster than other parts of the world. As average temperatures increase, the risk of extreme heat goes up. Across the contiguous United States, average temperatures have already risen about 60% more than the global average since 1970.” Heating faster than the rest of the world isn’t enough – some parts of the USA have to to heat even faster than that: “The northern and western parts of the country are projected to warm even more.”

In case you think I’m cherry-picking here, I’m not. The Canadian Climate Institute says that “Canada is warming twice as fast as the global average, and Canada’s Arctic is warming nearly four times as fast.”

Yes, yes, I hear you say, but you’ve cheated by going north of the USA. We already know that the Arctic is heating faster, so Canada was always going to give you that result. Well, maybe, but then again the Mexico News Daily assures us that “Temperatures in Mexico are rising faster than the global average”.

So that’s Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, Australia, the Arctic and Antarctica all heating faster than the global average. And it’s not just land where this amazing phenomenon of everywhere heating by more than the average is occurring. It’s true of the oceans too. NOAA tells us that “The North Pacific has warmed significantly faster than any other ocean basin on Earth since 2013”. Meanwhile, the University of Reading assures us that “Since 2016 the Atlantic Ocean has warmed faster than other ocean basins in the top 100 meters of ocean”.

Research published in Nature also advises us that “During 1979–2021, major portions of the Arctic Ocean were warming at least four times as fast as the global average”.

A 2022 study of the Indian Ocean concluded that “Sea-surface temperature (SST) in the Indian Ocean has warmed by approximately 1°C since 1950, among the fastest rate of increase in the global oceans”.

The British Antarctic Survey has found that “the Southern Ocean is gaining heat faster than the rest of the global ocean”.

DW opines that “The average temperature of the North Sea has risen twice as fast as the oceans of the world.”

A study in Nature suggests that “Since the early 1980s, the shallow and brackish Baltic Sea, located in northern Europe, has warmed fastest of all the world’s coastal seas.”

Climate change (aka global boiling) is a remarkable phenomenon – everywhere is heating faster than the average. I don’t know about the laws of physics, but it seems that the laws of mathematics have been well and truly overturned. .