Hottest Shattering Year since the last one: Five reasons it was not hot, and not relevant

Tell the world, 2015 is the hottest year since 2010.

The fuss made over contested decimal points in highly adjusted datasets of irrelevant factors only shows how unscientific the public debate is. It probably wasn’t the hottest year in the last 150, and even it was, who cares – that doesn’t tell us anything about the cause. (Remember when cause and effect used to matter to a scientist?) Natural forces like the Sun and clouds can cause hot years too. Even if it was “the hottest” in a short noisy segment, the world has been hotter before (and life on Earth thrived) and the climate models are still hopelessly wrong. If CO2 was a big driver of the climate, 2015 should have been a lot hotter.

1. It wasn’t the hottest year. Satellites have better, broader coverage, surveying almost the whole planet (rather than selected car parks, runways, etc. like the surface thermometers). The satellites say that both 1998 and 2010 were hotter. In any case, these kind of piddling noisy differences are just street signs on the road to nowhere — what matters are the long term trends, and the predictions of climate models. (If the models worked, “scientists” wouldn’t need to do a gala performance about nothing eh?)

2. 2015 was a failure for Global Worriers — not hot enough. Compared to 1998, the IPCC-endorsed climate models all say it should be warmer than it was. We had another El Nino in 2015, and since 1998 humans put out more than a third of their all-time CO2 emissions, yet 2015 was cooler than 1998 and 2010. CO2 is not driving the climate.

3. It’s been hotter before, and for thousands of years. It’s normal. Even if 2015 had been the hottest year in modern records (which start in 1850), the world was still hotter many times in the last ten thousand years. Antarctica didn’t melt. The Great Barrier Reef survived, and so did polar bears and penguins. Warm weather is not an apocalypse, and it wasn’t caused by CO2.

Get a grip at the way temperatures rose and crashed in Greenland (below). Current temperatures are probably similar to the Medieval Warm Period (this graph ends around 1900AD). The spikes here only represent Greenland, not the whole world, but the message is clear. Climate change is normal, and what’s happening now is not unusual.

4. Where is cause and effect? The latest batch of global warming started long before CO2 started rising. None of the scientists can explain why global warming started nearly 200 years before the first coal fired power station. Either coal affects the space-time continuum, or perhaps they read the tea leaves wrong?

Back in WWII we could have had the same headlines. If you were alive from 1938 to 1948, you could have heard about five of those records being broken. (H/t and graph thanks to Geoff Sherrington with red annotation from me.)

6. Shattered? What kind of scientist is shattered that it was a tenth of a degree warmer than the last area-averaged, homogenized, adjusted record? They should be shattered that they still can’t explain the pause, the medieval warm period, the little ice age, or the missing hot spot.

MIT Professor, Richard Lindzen, says these “hottest year” claims are “spin on nothing”

Thanks to Climate Depot:

“And the proof that the uncertainty is tenths of a degree are the adjustments that are being made. If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree,” he added.

“70% of the earth is oceans, we can’t measure those temperatures very well. They can be off a half a degree, a quarter of a degree. Even two-10ths of a degree of change would be tiny but two-100ths is ludicrous. Anyone who starts crowing about those numbers shows that they’re putting spin on nothing.”

The things the media won’t tell us

Joe Bast, Heartland Institute

Bast: “The “news’ story makes no mention of the Congressional investigation of NOAA underway, finding evidence that NOAA falsified its temperature data. No mention that the surface station data aren’t actually global and are known to exaggerate warming trends. And are contradicted by the truly global satellite data, which are in turn validated by weather balloon data. Or that saying “reliable global record-keeping began in 1880” conveniently puts the beginning of the data series at the end of the Little Ice Age. Heartland’s James Taylor tried to inoculate the press from NOAA’s virus with a piece last week at Forbes.com “2015 Was Not Even Close To Hottest Year On Record”.

UPDATE: Top Graph updated to add the word “satellite” instead of “main” which reflects that this is just the main satellite sets. To see all of the main surface sets, including the satellites (notice how similar they are) see this graph published 2 days later. Thanks to DavidR. I prefer this clarification.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to Josh and Twinotter for pointing out the x axis title on the GISP graph was out by 50 years. The wording “Years Before Present (2000AD)” was incorrect and has been changed to “Years Before Present (1950AD)”. The change doesn’t affect the message or meaning here, but I’m grateful. The graph is more accurate. Thanks also to Just-a-guy for his analysis.

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