WND | Bob Unruh | Jan. 16, 2015
‘Please laugh out loud when someone will be telling you that it was the warmest’
When scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA released their assessment Friday that 2014 was the hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping, proponents of the theory that mankind is causing catastrophic global warming joined together as in a chorus.
“We are witnessing, before our eyes, the effect of human-caused climate change,” Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann said in the report.
“It is exceptionally unlikely that we would be seeing a record year, during a record warming decade, during a multi-decadal period of warmth that appears to be unrivaled over at least the past millennium if it were not for the rising of planet-warming gases produced by fossil-fuel burning.”
But Mann has been described by WND columnist and former Margaret Thatcher aide Christopher Monckton as “the charlatan who created the now-discredited ‘hockey-stick’ graph that incorrectly purposed to eradicate the medieval warm period and concluded that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in 1,300 years.”
A number of reputable scientists also immediately cast doubt on the federal government’s declaration Friday.
“Using the normal rules of science, is 58.46 degrees then distinguishable from 58.45 degrees? In a word, ‘No,’” wrote Patrick J. Michaels on the Cato Institute website.
His assessment was cited on Marc Morano’s Climate Depot website, which routinely debunks claims of global warming.
Climatologist Roy Spencer is quoted there: “We are arguing over the significance of a hundredths of a degree.”
And physicist Lubos Motl: “Please laugh out loud when someone will be telling you that it was the warmest year.”
Even acceptance of the federal reports, climatologist Judith Curry pointed out at Climate Depot, further undermines the Earth is warming.
“With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade,” Curry said.
Morano explained: “There are dueling global datasets – surface temperature records and satellite records – and they disagree. The satellites show an 18 year plus global warming ‘standstill’ and the satellite was set up to be ‘more accurate’ than the surface records.”
He argued any temperature claim of “hottest year” based on surface data is based on hundredths of a degree hotter than previous “hottest years.”
“This immeasurable difference is not even within the margin of error of temperature gauges. The claim of the ‘hottest year’ is simply a political statement not based on temperature facts.”
“‘Hottest year’ claims are based on minute fractions of a degree while ignoring satellite data showing earth is continuing the 18 plus year ‘pause’ or ‘standstill,’” he wrote.
Morano, a former staff member of the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, reported on his site that “even former NASA global warming chief scientist James Hansen, the leading proponent of man-made global warming in the U.S., conceded in 2011 that the ‘hottest year’ rankings are essentially meaningless.”
Climate Depot reported: “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.’”
The website’s report noted the climatologist Michaels mocking the idea of the “hottest year.”
“Whether or not a given year is a hundredth of a degree or so above a previous record is not the issue. What IS the issue is how observed temperatures compare to what has been forecast to happen,” Michaels said.
The AP’s Seth Borenstein reported the government’s announcement that both the NOAA and NASA “calculated that in 2014 the world had its hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping.”
He noted the agencies did not agree on the precise number, with NOAA recording an average temperature of 58.24 degrees, 1.24 degrees above the 20th century average. NASA had it at 58.42 degrees.
The AP said the “heat was driven by record warmth in the world’s oceans that didn’t just break old marks: It shattered them.”
“Record warmth spread across far eastern Russia, the western part of the United States, interior South America, much of Europe, northern Africa and parts of Australia. One of the few cooler spots was in the central and eastern United States.”
But Morano reported last year that Borenstein has been known to publish “propaganda.”
“AP’s Borenstein can be trusted to shill for U.N.’s climate summit. … Borenstein ignores tide gauges on sea level showing deceleration of sea level rise and ignores satellite temperatures which show the earth in an 18 year ‘pause’ or ‘standstill’ of global warming.”
But many scientists argue that data fed to NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation have confirmed the global mean surface temperature has not risen for 18 consecutive years.
A team of scientists and others on a team assembled by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which focuses on free-market solutions to problems, have concluded the “scare” of global warming from the use of carbon fuels and other human activities “is over.”
It’s “past time” for the world to realize that and “stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat,” contended Kenneth Haapala, executive vice president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project in Virginia, recently. He’s also a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute.
The organization pointed out the latest data “extends the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming to a new record, one not predicted by the climate models of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.”
Craig Idso, senior fellow in environment for the Heartland Institute and co-editor of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a counterpart to the IPCC, said that to “the world’s climate alarmists, atmospheric carbon dioxide is a dangerous trace gas, and for years, they have been insisting its increase will raise global temperatures and wreak havoc upon Earth’s climate and biosphere.”
“Yet, despite a 9 percent increase in CO2 over the past 18 years, there has been no rise in global temperature,” he said.
“Think about that. Over this time period the air’s CO2 content has risen some 40 parts per million, which represents fully one-third the total global CO2 increase since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, yet contrary to model projections, planetary temperatures have failed to rise,” Idso said.
Idso said it’s “time for global warming diehards to face the facts.”
Meteorologist John Coleman said simply it’s time to dump the theory.
“There has not been any significant man-made global warming in the past, there is none now, and there is no reason to expect any in the future,” he said. “The computer models that predicted the warming have failed to verify. There has been no warming in 18 years. The ice at the poles is stable. The polar bears are increasing. The oceans are not rising.”
Monckton has been blunt on the issue: “Worldwide, the liarists – growing ever more desperate as the Great Pause grows ever longer – are taking up the cry that The Models Were Right All Along But The Warming Has Gone Into Hiding, Really And Truly It Has, With Knobs On, Cross My Heart And Hope To Die, So There.
“Just one problem with that. The catastrophist clique no longer entirely controls the scientific journals. It tried to, but it didn’t get away with it. In addition to ‘The ocean ate my global warming,’ the scientific journals contain a host of recent papers giving between them no less than 25 – yes, 25 – mutually incompatible explanations of the Great Pause.”
About two years ago, Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw its coldest days ever, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.
The holes in the global warming theory have been documented. For example, London’s Independent newspaper declared at the turn of the millennium “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, as saying snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he claimed at the time.
But the authoritative reputation of East Anglia was seriously downgraded in 2009 when leaked emails proved researchers there were engaged in a major scheme to manipulate and suppress evidence against global warming, misconduct London’s Telegraph newspaper called “the worst scientific scandal of our generation.”
The rhetoric and predictions of global warming acolytes have been every bit as confusing in the United States, with former vice president and carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore telling an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And his 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.
Well-known scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project, which to date has gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate.”
They say, “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plan and animal environments of the Earth.”
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
He told WND that weather does change over time and that the global system goes through cycles, some slightly warmer and some slightly cooler than others.