A joint press release by NOAA and NASA on January 16 claimed that “The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880…” The mainstream press ran with the story as if it portended doom. Now, we find that the NOAA/NASA press release left out several vital pieces of information.
The press release failed to mention that the calculated global temperature for 2014 was only 0.02 deg C (two-hundredths of a degree) higher than the formerly hottest 2010; not anything to get excited about. The press release failed to mention that the error range in the measurements was at least ±0.1 deg C, an order of magnitude greater than the difference touted. And they failed to mention that NOAA/NASA did not include data from satellites which show that 2014 was no where near the warmest. The touted temperature high was based only on surface measurements which are subject to a great many biases and do not cover the whole globe as satellites do.
Former Harvard physicist Luboš Motl says they did it on purpose and the press release provides “A direct proof that the professional alarmists are intentionally lying.” (Source)
Reporter David Rose of the Daily Mail in England interviewed Gavin Schmidt head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). During that interview Schmidt conceded that because of the uncertainties in temperature data, NASA is only 38% confident that 2014 was the warmest since 1880. The press release failed to mention that fact also. (Source)
Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot wrote, “The Feds are conning the public on 2014 being the ‘hottest year.’ We now know that both NASA and NOAA knew their ‘hottest year’ claims would not hold up to scientific scrutiny. But both agencies chose instead to loudly push the global warming narrative to a willing and compliant news media. The ‘hottest year’ claims had already been exposed as statistically meaningless…”
Dr. Roy Spencer of UAH (one of the two keepers of NASA satellite data) comments:
“In the three decades I’ve been in the climate research business, it’s been clear that politics have been driving the global warming movement.
“We still don’t understand what causes natural climate change to occur, so we simply assume it doesn’t exist. This despite abundant evidence that it was just as warm 1,000 and 2,000 years ago as it is today. Forty years ago, “climate change” necessarily implied natural causation; now it only implies human causation.
“What changed? Not the science…our estimates of climate sensitivity are about the same as they were 40 years ago.
“What changed is the politics. And not just among the politicians. At AMS [American Meteorological Society] or AGU [American Geophysical Union] scientific conferences, political correctness and advocacy are now just as pervasive as they have become in Geophysical school. Many (mostly older) scientists no longer participate and many have even resigned in protest.
“Science as a methodology for getting closer to the truth has been all but abandoned. It is now just one more tool to achieve political ends.
“In what universe does a temperature change that is too small for anyone to feel over a 50 year period become globally significant? Where we don’t know if the global average temperature is 58 or 59 or 60 deg. F, but we are sure that if it increases by 1 or 2 deg. F, that would be a catastrophe?”
Will Obama keep up the pretense and claim that 2014 was the hottest year in his State of the Union address?
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