Oh My! 2010 tied for ‘hottest’ year?! Relax, it is ‘purely a political statement’ — Even NASA’s Hansen admits it is ‘not particularly important’ — Prof. mocks ‘hottest decade’ claim as ‘a joke’

 

Climate Depot Editorial

There they go again. The global warming establishment and the media are crowing about 2010 being in a tie for the “hottest year” ever. Everyone from Senator John Kerry to Joe Romm are screaming that this is “proof” the planet is burning up in a Co2 induced hell — and it’s your fault!

It is time for Climate Depot to do a point-by-point rebuttal to the latest round of temperature data nonsense. Let’s begin:

Below are excerpts from the January 13, 2011 UK Telegraph’s coverage of the warmists’ claim of the “hottest year” ever.

UK Telegraph Headline Claim: “Flood warnings: hottest year confirms global warming say experts — Last year was the joint warmest on record, according to new figures from NASA, that experts say confirm the case for man-made climate change.”

Climate Depot Response: This is pure politics, not science. The “hottest year” claims confirm the case for political science overtaking climate science. The “hottest year” claim depends on minute fractions of a degree difference between years. Even NASA’s James Hansen, the leading proponent of man-made global warming in the U.S., conceded the “hottest year” rankings are essentially meaningless. Hansen explained that 2010 differed from 2005 by less than 2 hundredths of a degree F (that’s 0.018F).It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” Hansen admitted on January 13. According to NASA, none of agencies tasked with keeping the global temperature data agree with each other. “Rankings of individual years often differ in the most closely watched temperature analyses — from GISS, NCDC, and the UK Met Office — a situation that can generate confusion.”

Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University ridiculed the “hottest year” rankings and Hansen’s admission that it “was not particularly important” which year was declared the “hottest.” “Well, then stop issuing press releases which tout the rankings, which are subject to change ex post facto,” Maue demanded in a January 14 commentary at WattsUpWithThat.com.

The “warmest year” claim falls apart even further when you look at even slightly longer time scales. Climatologist Patrick Michaels explained to USA Today on January 12: “If you draw a trend line from the data, it’s pretty flat from the 1990s. We don’t see much of a warming trend over the past 12 years.” Also note that the planet has warmed since about 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age.

The declaration that we are experiencing a tie for the “hottest” year is purely a political statement because these claims are based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few hundredths of a degree. NASA asserts that the trend over the last decade is the most important factor, but this claim does not hold up to scrutiny either. See: German Climate Professor Werner Kirstein Slams ‘Climate Religion’: Refutes claims of ‘hottest decade’ as ‘a joke’ — ‘Determining a global avg. is a tricky business and in the end is only a theoretical value’

MIT’s Richard Lindzen: Earth is never in equilibrium: ‘Global warming enthusiasts are arguing that the past decade has been the warmest on record. We are still speaking of tenths of a degree, and the records themselves have come into question’

MIT’s Richard Lindzen: ‘For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause’

MIT’s Richard Lindzen: ‘Lull in warming was unsurprising, given an earlier ‘obsessing about tenths of a degree in the 1980s and early 1990s’: ‘Global temperature just fluctuates. I think the best explanation is the ocean. The timescale for ocean circulations can be decades.’

Meteorologist Art Horn: ‘To say the 2010 was tied with the warmest year on record is essentially meaningless when viewed in a true historical context’: ‘The reason they do not give this record its true historical context is because their statement is really political’

Science Corrupted: It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature — Activist James Hansen’s claims based on ‘pure conjecture’ — Hansen’s Climate Con: ‘The parts of the world which GISS shows to be heating up the most are so short of weather stations that only 25 per cent of the figures are based on actual temperature readings’

2007: Team of Scientists Question Validity of a ‘Global Temperature’ – Excerpt: “Discussions on global warming often refer to ‘global temperature.’ Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility, says Physicist Dr. Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. “It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth.” “A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. He explains that while it is possible to treat temperature statistics locally, it is meaningless to talk about a global temperature for Earth. “The globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average ‘global exchange rate.'”

Are Modern Temperature Changes ‘Unprecedented?’ The Data Clearly Reveals Modern Temp Changes To Be Normal — ‘Unfortunately for all alarmists, the real data reveals the bogosity of their claims’

Warmists at Grist Mag. Upset at failed PR Stunt of ‘Hottest’ Year: ‘The timing couldn’t be worse: with snow in every state but Florida (yes, even Hawaii)… And scientists wonder why they continue to see [low] poll numbers’

Analysis: NOAA & NCDC Pursue Goal of ‘Warmest Year Ever’ For 2010 – Release Newly ‘Fabricated’ Global Temperatures

Analysis: ‘150 years of ‘records’ is not long. It was warmer 1000 years ago, 2000 years ago, 5000 years ago and 130,000 years ago’

Scientists continue to bail out on man-made global warming, especially since the Climategate scandal. See: SPECIAL REPORT: More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Challenge UN IPCC & Gore – Dec. 2010

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UK Guardian Claim: “This is despite less solar activity and the onset of La Nina, an irregular cycle that brings cooler temperatures to the Pacific Ocean”

Climate Depot Rebuttal: Actually, much of 2010 was dominated by a strong warming El Nino. La Nina did not kick in until later in the year. It is also amusing to see that the temperatures in the U.S. were glossed over. See: Inconvenient Temps: According to NCDC’s own data, 2010 was not the warmest year in the United States, nor even a tie — It ranked 94th!! – ‘There’s no mention of the 2010 ranking for the USA temperature at all, nor any mention of the fact that 2010 was not nearly as warm as 1998, or 1934’

UK Guardian Reports: “Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics said: ‘The evidence is overwhelming that human activities are driving climate change, and the public should not be fooled by those who seek to delay and prevent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by claiming that the Earth is cooling or that carbon dioxide does not cause warming.’”

Climate Depot Response: Here is the heart of the warmist “hottest” year claims. We must act now to prevent climate doom. Those darn meddling skeptics are keeping us from passing meaningless and purely symbolic climate bills! Poor Bob Ward, he is now lamenting that no seems to care about the claims of the “hottest year” during the midst of a brutally cold and snowy winter. Ward asked: “Yesterday’s announcement that 2010 tied for the warmest year ever recorded on Earth was ignored by nearly all UK media outlets. How can this be?”

The answer is obvious. No one is buying the manufactured tripe surrounding claims based on fractions of a degree. The public instinctively knows these claims are motivated by pure politics. Get used to it Mr.Ward. NASA’s James Hansen’s old bag of tricks no longer works. The public has figured out the tricks and won’t be fooled again.

UK Guardian Reports: Daniel J. Weiss, who directs climate strategy for the Center for American Progress, told the Washington Post, said the figures should force the world to take action. “Hopefully, this new data will finally convince congressional climate-science deniers that global warming is real and that action is urgent,” he told the Washington Post.

Climate Depot Response: Once again, politics is driving the “science.” We see how “scientific” data is telegraphed by leading government global warming institutions to promote specific policy objectives. Sorry Mr. Weiss, passing a meaningless climate bill that Obama’s own EPA admits would not impact global Co2 levels — let alone global temperatures — is not going to translate in taking “urgent” action. See: For Shame: NAS Pres. Ralph Cicerone Turns Science Org. into political advocacy group: $6 million NAS study is used to lobby for global warming bill

UK Guardian Reports: Dan Weiss added: “To reject this latest evidence is like ignoring strange spots on a chest X-ray and continuing to smoke.”

Climate Depot Response to Dan Weiss: Dan, you have your metaphors all mixed up. It should be: “To accept these latest claims by quack doctors — like James Hansen, Michael Oppenheimer and Kevin Trenberth — is like ignoring reams of evidence that they should have their licenses revoked for repeated malpractice.”

You would have to question the diagnosis of any “doctor” who is pushing his costly and purely placebo remedies on a patient who is not even sick. As warmists like Kevin Trenberth grow more and more desperate and see every weather event as more “proof” of man-made global warming, the more apt metaphor for them would be “witch doctor.” Note: Morano and Weiss debated on ABC News: See here. Also See: Watch Now: Climate Depot’s Morano on Fox News Mocking ‘Climate Astrology’: ‘This is now akin to the predictions of Nostradamus or the Mayan calendar’ — Morano: ‘There is no way anyone can falsify the global warming theory now because any weather event that happens ‘proves’ their case…Man-made global warming has ceased to be a science, it is now the level of your daily horoscope’ — Gore [in 2006 film] did not warn us of extreme blizzards and record cold winters coming’

Even more strange are claims that the record snow is caused by man-made global warming. See: Basic Chemistry For Climate Science Mental Midgets: Excerpt: “Temperatures in the US have been running far below normal. Cold air holds less water than warm air. So if you say ‘snow cover in 49 states is due to more moisture in the air from global warming’ – then you have absolutely no idea WTF you are talking about.The air is not warm, and Sea Surface Temperatures are also running well below normal. The widespread snow cover is due to cold, not the imaginary warmth inside your computer model.”

UK Guardian Claim: “In another marker of climate change, Arctic sea ice cover was the third smallest since record-keeping began in 1979.”

Climate Depot Response: The “record” is based on just 30 years. It is odd the media or the warmist propagandists make no mention of Antarctic sea ice which has been at or near record highs. It is odd that they do not note that global sea ice in December 2010 was well above normal. See: NSIDC Shows Global Sea Ice Extent Almost 1 Million Km^2 Above Normal

Since the low point of Arctic ice in 2007, it has rebounded. [Note: Even the low point of Arctic sea ice extent in 2007 was not caused by CO2 driven warming. Multiple peer-review papers found it was due to high pressure days, ocean currents and “unusual winds.” — see links below]

Arctic ice rebounded significantly in 2009 from the low of 2007. (by an area more than one and half the size of Texas in 2009) In 2010, Arctic sea ice extent GREW by over 7,000 Manhattans in 3 years! Also see: The Area Of Thick Arctic Ice Has Doubled In The Last Two Years

The warmists are ignoring the record ice growth in the Antarctic and the fact that global sea ice recently hit a 30 year high. See: Antarctic Sea Ice 30,000 Manhattans Above Normal — Antarctic Ice Above Normal 83% Of The Time Since Mid-2007 & See: Perspective on Arctic Ice: Mockery: ‘You can see why some ‘scientists’ at NASA and NOAA want to re-engineer the world’s economy over a possibly missing ice cube.’

Warmist Claim: “Derek Arndt, who heads the climate monitoring branch at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said the new data should be viewed in the context of the record retreat of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere at the end of the melt season…”

Climate Depot Response: Arndt’s claim is bizarre, misleading and intellectually dishonest. See: Ministry Of Truth Announces ‘record retreat of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere’ – But it was the ‘second largest winter snow cover on record’

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Related Link:

Lord Christopher Monckton on the ‘Hottest Year’ – January 10 2010: Excerpt: The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate-extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate-extremist groups maintain. […] What is important is how fast the world is warming. In fact, the rate of warming from 1975-2001, at 0.16 C° per decade, was the fastest rate to be sustained for more than a decade in the 160-year record, but exactly the same rate occurred from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, when we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all. […] After 300 years of global warming, during nearly all of which we could not on any view have influenced the climate to a measurable degree, it is scarcely surprising that recent decades will be warmer than earlier decades. That is what one would expect. If one has been climbing up a steep hill for a long time, one should not be surprised to find oneself higher up at the end of the climb than at the beginning. […] In fact, the global sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, because the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice. Indeed, when the summer extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high. The record low was widely reported; the corresponding record high was almost entirely unreported.

Related Links:

Inconvenient Temps: Global Temperatures Have Dropped 0.5C In The Last 12 Months — 150 years of global warming (0.7C) going down the drain!AccuWeather Meteorologist Joe Bastardi: ‘You wanna say 2010 was the warmest year ever… will get ready for 2011 — being the biggest drop ever’

Weather Underground Forecasting All Time Record Cold For The Northern Hemisphere Tonight at -92F — Previous coldest temp ever recorded in N. Hemisphere was -90F – January 14, 2011

Global sea ice anomaly is positive: Physicist: “Imagine that. Several decades of news reports about Armageddon and melting ice and after 30 years, we’re exactly where we were in 1980.”

Antarctic sea ice is nearing record high again as well. See: June 2010: Antarctic sea ice more than two standard deviations *above* normal; CO2 blamed

See July 2010: Antarctic sea ice peaks at third highest in the satellite

See: October 2009: Antarctic Summer Ice Melt at ‘lowest ever recorded in the satellite history’

‘Ice has flatlined in the North Pole, while it goes through the roof in the South Pole…The widely claimed polar meltdown continues to be nothing more than bad fiction’

Arctic chills down: ‘Arctic shows no signs of warming, according to the latest data from the Danish Meteorological Institute’s Centre for Ocean and Ice — ‘Casts doubt on climate models that had predicted a steady warming of the Arctic’

Warmist Scientist Mark Serreze Recants for stirring up Arctic ice scare stories: ‘In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that…we read too much into it’

Analysis of 2007 ‘record’ Arctic ice low: ‘Ice was compacting…It lost area – while it gained thickness’

Climate Depot Arctic Fact Sheet – Get the latest peer-reviewed studies and analysis — Arctic Ice Changes in past 3 years due to ‘shifting winds’

 

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