Article content continued

The President noted that 2014 was “the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does — 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.”

And? No sensible skeptic “denies” that the world has been on a slight warming trend for the past century, with average global temperatures rising around 0.8 degrees Centigrade. Thus the fact that recent years have been “the warmest on record” (with the record going back only to 1880) is merely obvious.

The critical issues are not the past warming trend but the relative contribution of human emissions, whether the trend will continue, and what, if anything, should be done about it, apart from adaptation.

Mr. Obama went on to say “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities.”

The president’s appeal to authority should perhaps be viewed against the fact that his science advisor, John Holdren, has suggested both that the U.S. needs to be “de-developed” and that the population problem might be solved by putting something in the water supply.

Meanwhile if Mr. Obama were to consult the two government-science institutions he names, he would discover — apart from the claim that 2014 was indeed “the warmest,” but only “possibly” because the margin of error was five times larger than the difference with the next warmest year — that (a) the warming trend has plateaued in this century (with the plateau still obviously representing the warmest period) and (b) that this plateauing was not forecast by any of the official models on which catastrophe is predicated.