‘Hottest Year’ Claim: ‘Miniscule Change in Imaginary Number’ – ‘The media is running breathless stories about a miniscule change in an imaginary number’
'Two one-hundredths of a degree is not what the public imagines when journalists use words such surge and sizzle – but that’s what we’re talking about here...Yet the geniuses at CBC think that this particular 2/100s warrants not just one new story, but an ongoing series. Between them, these three articles use the word “record” 48 times.'
'None of these stories point out that, 135 years ago, thermometers were considerably less reliable. Which means that today’s scientists may be comparing apples to pears...None of these stories point out that 135 years is a mere blink of an eye, geologically speaking. That we’re being asked to believe that something unusual is happening on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet based on a mere 135 years of data.'
'Nor do any of these stories alert us to the fact that the average global temperature has been called a mathematical impossibility. It is an abstraction, nothing more.'
'When your child has a fever, even modern, high-tech digital thermometers only record changes of one tenth of a degree. A change one fifth that size – 2/100s – is too small to be meaningful.'
