The establishment media is once again further discrediting itself by hyping brazenly bogus “warmest on record” claims, this time arguing falsely that 2014 was the “hottest year ever.” In reality, it was not even close.
Experts also pointed out that the “pause” in global warming has now been ongoing for almost two decades, contrary to every United Nations prediction. However, desperate for some sort of scary “climate” story to generate some semblance of support for shackling humanity to a UN CO2 regime, the international press and global-warming theorists are citing the dubious data set from the Japan Meteorological Agency to make their case. More cooked government data and fear-mongering by the media claiming 2014 was the “hottest year ever recorded” is expected in the coming weeks.
The biggest problem is that the claim is not true — just like the vast majority of the other times that tax-funded alarmists and the increasingly discredited media parroted the same claim. Even using the satellite temperature data from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), which stretches back only 36 years, 2014 was colder than both 1998 and 2010. In addition, 2014 was only warmer than many other years in the last three and a half decades by such a tiny margin as to be statistically insignificant, climate scientists said. In other words, the UAH satellite temperature data, available online for all to see, clearly and totally exposes the “2014 warmest on record” claim as false. Perhaps that is why virtually no members of the establishment press have bothered to inform their declining readerships about it.
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According to Dr. Roy Spencer, a Ph.D. in meteorology who served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA before becoming principal research scientist at UAH, 2014 was the third warmest year since 1979, “but just barely.” Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at UAH, also noted that last year was the third warmest in 36 years according to the satellite measurements, “but by such a small margin (0.01 C) as to be statistically similar to other recent years.” “While it may have been warm, it was not special,” he added. “The 0.01 C difference between 2014 and 2005, or the 0.02 difference with 2013 are not statistically different from zero,” Dr. Christy continued. “That might not be a very satisfying conclusion, but it is at least accurate.” The UAH also reportedly contains some warming bias, according to experts, with other measures showing even more years in recent decades that were warmer than 2014.
Separately, the RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) set of global satellite temperature data revealed that the period without any global warming has now jumped to 18 years and 3 months, stretching back to October of 1996 — or more than half of the satellite record. “The hiatus period of 18 years 3 months, or 219 months, is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend,” explained Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, a well-known climate skeptic and former science policy advisor to then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in an analysis of the latest RSS data. “The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with ‘substantial confidence’ that the science was settled and the debate over. Nature had other ideas.”
The RSS data suggests 2014 was even colder than the UAH satellite data set showed it to be, putting last year between the sixth and seventh warmest years in the satellite record, which, again, goes back less than four decades. According to the RSS-AMSU data set, 1998, 2010, 2005, 2003, and 2002 were all definitely warmer. Physicist Lubos Motl, a former Harvard professor, citing the RSS data, even urged people to “please laugh out loud” whenever someone ludicrously claims that 2014 “was the warmest year.” He also noted that, on average, the most recent nine-year period was actually colder than the previous one — though the reader who relies on the discredited establishment press would never know it amid all the “warmest on record” fantasies and propaganda.
Climate experts such as Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the hiatus was likely to go for at least another decade. More than a few scientists studying climate issues — John Casey at the Space and Science Research Corporation, for example, among many others — are forecasting a long period of global cooling ahead. “The Earth is about to begin a steep drop in global temperatures off its present global temperature plateau,” said Casey, a rocket scientist and climate researcher. “This plateau has been caused by the absence of growth in global temperatures for 18 years, the start of global cooling in the atmosphere and the oceans, and the end of a short period of moderate solar heating from an unusually active secondary peak in solar cycle #24.”
It is also worth noting that, around the time the satellites went up, many of the same global-warming alarmists of today were still hyping their man-made global-cooling theory. As Newsweek reported in its 1975 article “The Cooling World” arguing that temperatures has been plunging for decades due to human activities: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climate change, or even to allay its effects.” Some of the “more spectacular solutions” proposed by the cooling theorists at the time included “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot,” Newsweek reported in the same article. Fortunately for humanity, cooler heads prevailed — at least until the UN and other totalitarian-minded forces seized on the man-made global-warming theory to advance the same anti-human, anti-liberty, anti-energy, anti-prosperity agenda.
While global warming theorists were busy hyping their fraudulent “warmest on record” claims, what they were not talking about is far more revealing. For most of 2014, for example, global sea-ice levels were well above average, contrary to warmist models and predictions. Around Antarctica, sea-ice levels in 2014 smashed through previous record highs set in recent years, with the Southern Hemisphere featuring more area of frozen sea than at any point since records began. At the start of 2015, Antarctic sea ice is still at a record high for this time of year — making a mockery of the doom-and-gloom hysteria of warming theorists who predicted rapidly declining ice levels. UN IPCC predictions of increased warming over the last 18 years, based on thoroughly discredited “climate models,” have now become laughingstocks, too.
Other experts noted that 2014 could be interpreted as the “least hot” year on record in the United States. “Last year recorded the smallest percent of stations to reach 90 degrees in U.S. history,” explained the independent climate researcher behind Real Science, a whistleblower who worked on U.S. government contracts to create climate models and now writes under the name Steven Goddard. “Only 84% of U.S. HCN stations reached 90 degrees. This was the first year when more than 15% of stations failed to reach 90 degrees any time during the year. Compare to 1931, when less than 2% of U.S. stations failed to reach 90 degrees. This metric is compiled from the same data set NCDC uses, and is not affected by time of observation issues.” Goddard also blasted NASA for altering its temperature records to make the past seem colder while making the present seem warmer.
Most of the latest media hysteria surrounding “warmest on record” allegations — some particularly alarmist “media” outlets are claiming it was the warmest year ever, or “likely the hottest in the history of human civilization” — is based on the Japanese government’s massaged temperature data. However, in the coming days and weeks, NASA and other tax-funded outfits paid to crank out warmist hysteria seeking to justify devastating policies sought by the UN, the Obama administration, and other forces are expected to emit more. While the data manipulation by these agencies has been well known and criticized since before the ClimateGate scandal confirmed the anti-science scheming to the world, based on even recent developments, it appears certain that the fudging and ignoring of real data will continue.
Still, putting the last few decades aside and going back further in time, as The New American magazine’s Ed Hiserodt and Rebecca Terrell documented in a recent cover story, makes 2014 seem downright cold when measured against various other times over the last few centuries and millennia. In fact, prior to the Little Ice Age that lasted from around the mid-16th century until about the middle of the 19th century, Vikings were farming and thriving on Greenland about a thousand years ago. That was long before humanity’s current relatively insignificant emissions of CO2 — making up just a fraction of one percent of all the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere — supposedly sparked “warming.” Today, the region is a largely frozen wasteland.
A week before the latest “warmest on record” hysteria began, meanwhile, the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, citing two recent scientific papers, reported, “Giant clam reveals Middle Ages were warmer than today.” The academy also said the findings proved that self-styled “climate scientists” were “wrong to abolish the Medieval Warm Period.” The UN IPCC acknowledged that the warm period was much warmer than today as recently as 1990, though pseudo-scientists working for the warmist “cause” have since tried to flush those facts down Orwell’s infamous memory hole.
Going back even further, temperature reconstructions of the Holocene period show that there have been numerous other times when the Earth was much, much warmer than today — and the evidence is overwhelming. About 3,300 years ago, Hiserodt and Terrell with The New American noted, temperatures peaked during the Minoan Warm Period, and then again during the Roman Warm Period some 2,000 years ago. “Climate alarmists conveniently overlook evidence during the Holocene optimum where there were extended periods of temperatures exceeding the averages by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above present temperatures,” they wrote. Similarly, climate alarmists continue to overlook data — the UAH and RSS data sets, for instance — that disprove their latest round of fear-mongering.
Even if 2014 had been the warmest on record — it was not even close — such an anomaly would hardly justify shackling humanity to a totalitarian global bureaucracy charged with treating a natural gas exhaled by humans as “pollution” in need of planetary regulation and taxation. With what will likely be the UN’s final opportunity to foist its “warming” regime on humanity coming up later this year in Paris, though, it is hardly surprising to see tax-funded “climate scientists” and establishment media outlets working overtime and blatantly manufacturing facts to whip up an extra dose of fear. Again, last year was not the warmest on record. In a historical context, it was actually quite chilly. Ask yourself: Why are governments and establishment media outlets claiming it was the warmest? The answer will reveal a lot, about a lot more than just “climate science.”
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at: [email protected]
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