Last week, according to our crackerjack mainstream media, NASA announced that 2014 was the hottest year, like, ever.◼ Climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer lays the smack to '2014 warmest year ever' nonsense - Dan Calabrese/Herman Cain
No, really. The New York Times began its report with: “Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history.”
Well, not really. As we’re about to see, this is a claim that dissolves on contact with actual science. But that didn’t stop the press from running with it....
That “recorded history” gaffe is even worse when you consider that during “recorded history,” in the 5,000-year sense of the phrase, there’s good evidence that the Earth has been warmer than it is today.
We don’t have thermometer measurements going back that far, but scientists can use “proxies”—things they can measure that tend to vary with temperature, such as the composition of ancient deposits of seashells, or the thickness of the rings in ancient, slow-growing trees—to get very rough estimates. These have usually shown warmer temperatures during Roman times and the Middle Ages, when “recorded history” describes wine grapes growing in Northern England and Newfoundland.
There have been a few attempts to write these warm periods out of existence—one of them being Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph, which implausibly asserts that global temperatures remained totally flat in every century except the 20th—but these claims have been controversial to say the least....
So allow me to suggest a more accurate first sentence to sum up this story: “In the tiny little blip of geological time for which we have accurate surface temperature records, last year was pretty much the same as 2005 and 2010, continuing a plateau of global temperatures that has lasted nearly 20 years.”
What remains of the original description of this news? Nothing but bluff, spin, and the uncritical press-release journalism that dominates mainstream reporting on the climate. It may or may not be the hottest year ever, but this is definitely in the running for the most dishonest year on record.
Dr. Roy Spencer is a real problem for global warmists. They can't say he's not a climate scientist, because he is. They can't accuse him of taking oil industry money, because all the funding he's ever received has come from the U.S. government - including his work with NASA, NOAA and the Department of Energy.
And they can't refute his arguments, because he knows what he's talking about and they don't. So when he comes across their latest nonsense - this time the claim that 2014 was the warmest year on record - he takes aim and destroys the claim in beautiful fashion:
◼ 2014 as the Mildest Year: Why You are Being Misled on Global Temperatures - Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
In what universe does a temperature change that is too small for anyone to feel over a 50 year period become globally significant? Where we don’t know if the global average temperature is 58 or 59 or 60 deg. F, but we are sure that if it increases by 1 or 2 deg. F, that would be a catastrophe?◼ NASA: There's only a 38% chance we were 100% right when we said that 2014 was the hottest year ever. - Robert Laurie /Herman Cain TV
Where our only truly global temperature measurements, the satellites, are ignored because they don’t show a record warm year in 2014?
In what universe do the climate models built to guide energy policy are not even adjusted to reflect reality, when they over-forecast past warming by a factor of 2 or 3?
And where people have to lie about severe weather getting worse (it hasn’t)? Or where we have totally forgotten that more CO2 is actually good for life on Earth, leading to increased agricultural productivity, and global greening? ...
It’s the universe where political power and the desire to redistribute wealth have taken control of the public discourse. It’s a global society where people believe we can replace fossil fuels with unicorn farts and antigravity-based energy.
Feelings now trump facts....
It's common knowledge that we live in the environmental end times. The seas will soon boil away, the fish will die, and humanity will doubtless be forced into some kind of post-apocalyptic subsistence where we dwell in underground tunnels like worms. After all, back in 1988 environmentalists like Ted Danson were warning us that the oceans would be "dead" in ten years. We're well past that deadline, so something big bound to happen soon.
This weekend, as Dan discussed, we learned the horrible truth. NASA announced that 2014 was the "hottest year on record." Obviously, we've reached the point of no return. After all, this is NASA. It's science. ...And the scientific method involves proof, so it never lies.
But, apparently, it does leave things out. As the DailyMail is reporting, NASA admits that there's only a 38% chance that they are 100% correct.
