A new year means new heights in global warming hysteria

“There are some aspects of what is going on that remain puzzling,” explained a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Climate change means all past analogs are not so reliable,”  save when they advance the cause of hysteria, of course.

It’s become an unfortunate annual tradition, the same as the holidays themselves for progressives.  As the old year ends, we’re told in hyperbolic tones that it was undoubtedly the hottest year ever, or among the hottest among the even hotter still, and, as the new year begins, we’re breathlessly informed that it will undoubtedly be even hotter.  It might be comical if it wasn’t so corrosive, so dangerous to the point of driving young people to depression while sacrificing huge swaths of the economy to government control, consigning poor people to even more poverty. It is also completely and totally fabricated – if anyone bothered to look at the numbers underlying the headlines.  As CNN described it last week, for example, “Analyses last year had already confirmed 2023 to be the warmest on record, but Tuesday’s data shows an alarming leap in heating from 2016, previously the hottest year. In 2023, the average global temperature was 14.98 degrees Celsius — 0.17 degrees above the previous record — while warming in the world’s oceans also hit a new high.”  Two things jump out, each rather troubling if one cares about the “science” as they insist.  First, the headlines are largely a repeat of last year’s, where 2022 was variously seen as the fifth or sixth hottest, part of some set of the hottest years ever.  In January 2022, NBC described it this way “The planet had one of its hottest years on record in 2022, as ocean heat soared and sea ice coverage in Antarctica melted to near-record lows, two federal science agencies announced Thursday.”  The Guardian went on to note that it was part of “The relentless challenge of global heating… again…underscored by the tally of a passing year, with 2022 ranking as one of the warmest years ever recorded and the past eight years now collectively the hottest documented by modern science.”  To a cynic, it might seem like the focus is arbitrary, presented as whatever will generate the most apocalyptic headlines.  What scientific relevance does an eight year set have?  In 2016, for example, the “anomaly” in temperature, even assuming there is such a thing, was 1.00 Celsius.  In 2023, it was a reported 1.17 degrees, but in the intervening years it has variously bounced around from a low of .82 (2017) to the latest high.

Even if you assume these numbers are accurate, more on that in a moment, we have a scatterplot where the temperature might, emphasis on might, have increased by .17 degrees over close to decade, a variance in the absolute that is so small they don’t even bother to publish it anymore.  Instead, they promote the variance and leave it to you to figure out what this means by interpreting statements like this “The year 2022 was the sixth warmest year since global records began in 1880 at 0.86°C (1.55°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). This value is 0.13°C (0.23°F) less than the record set in 2016 and it is only 0.02°C (0.04°F) higher than the last year’s (2021) value, which now ranks as the seventh highest. The 10 warmest years in the 143-year record have all occurred since 2010, with the last nine years (2014–2022) ranking as the nine warmest years on record.”  Let’s do the math they won’t do:  The baseline average is the 20th century average at 13.9 degrees Celsius.  2016’s average temperature would be 14.9 degrees, or a potential 7% increase in temperature which sounds scary except it’s over yet another arbitrary timeframe given that it’s unclear you can even calculate a global average over a hundred years.  What does that number even mean in the real world?  What would it look like if they used the past 50 years of the 20th century?  30?  25?  Why use the whole century?  Regardless, 2023 would be at 15.07, a 1.1% difference compared to 2016 – if you assume that the variance concept makes any rational sense at all.  In order for any of this to work the way they would like, one would need to provide a concrete, scientific explanation for why using the average temperature over a century as the baseline is an accurate approach.  The human calendar is an arbitrary convention.  Nature doesn’t care what century we are in, or even years as they come and go.  Any structure we place on top of the workings of the world in an attempt to make sense of them needs to be justified – and measured against that justification – to have any scientific value.  Here, they provide none of this justification, leading to the obvious conclusion that the goal is to show continually rising temperatures and data must be fit into whatever framework makes that happen.  To put this in perspective, when 1998 was the hottest year ever the “anomaly” was based on the 1960 to 1990 period and was .56 degrees celsius.  It was .82 as late as 2017.  In other words, if you pick different years to start and end from, you can either flatten or increase the curve.

Second, and far worse:  All of these numbers are well within the margin of error, meaning that it is impossible to separate them from statistical noise.  A statistical analysis conducted last year found that 96% of the thermometers used to measure temperature in the United States are not accurate due to their placement.  The government’s own guidelines classify the quality of measurements generated by these thermometers according to their location.  Class 1 is considered optimal with no “artificial heating or reflecting surfaces…within 100 meters.”  Class 2 allows heat sources “within thirty meters” and “no shading when the sun elevation is greater than three degrees.”  Class 3, however, allows for an error greater than or equal to one degree Celsius with thermometers a mere 10 meters from “heating sources.”  Class 4 increases the error to two degrees, and allows sources within 10 meters.  Class 5, however, allows a whopping five degrees of error and the thermometer can be located “next to / above an artificial heating source, such as a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”  Class 1 and Class 2 thermometers found a .204 Celsius temperature increase per decade.  Class 3, 4, and 5 found a .319 increase, a difference of over 56%.  The government, however, reported an increase of a whopping .324 degrees, in other words they took the actual measurement plus the faulty measurement and increased it even further.  Regardless of what number you pick, it is mathematically impossible to accurately determine temperatures within .17% using thermometers that have margins of error of one degree or higher.  It is the equivalent of trying to measure an inch or two using a ruler with no markings.  Thus, the entire reported anomaly, whether you use the 100 year span of 1.17 degrees or the earlier span, is completely swamped by 96% of thermometers having an error rate of 1 degree or higher.  The idea that some have an error rate of five degrees, that is more than 4 times larger than the anomaly they are reporting, renders the data completely meaningless.  The next time a cop pulls you over for speeding, try using this logic:  How fast were you going, sir?  Well, I think I was only going the speed limit, but my speedometer only has 10 mile per hour increments.  Let’s just say I was going 60 miles per hour and call it accurate.

Sadly, this has not stopped climate scientists from continuing to make dire predictions before the new year is even a week old according to The Washington Post, or embarrassing themselves by claiming we’re entering an era of no snow for the second time according to CNN.  Late last year, CNN reported that “Winter is here, but it’s losing its cool.”  Winter, in their view, “is warming rapidly because of human-caused climate change and it’s having an impact on snow, tourism, winter sports, local economies, dinner plates and even allergies.  The winter period from December to February is now the fastest-warming of the three-month seasons for nearly 75% of the US, according to an analysis of NOAA temperature data by Climate Central, a nonprofit climate research group.  The analysis looked at average winter temperatures for 240 locations across the US and found the winter warming trend covers every corner of the map — temperatures had warmed in 97%, or 233, of the spots since 1970.”  For this report, they use 1970 as the starting point for reasons that remain undisclosed, save for they have the benefit of not easily being compared to the usual anomaly, claiming temperatures have increased by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit on average over the period.  This is an increase of approximately 2.1 degrees Celsius, but since they do not report this relative to the 100 year window they use for the annual anomalies, it is impossible to know what that means – twice as fast? – except that it’s bad.  “Wintertime plays important roles in the life cycles of plants, animals, and insects, the recharging of freshwater supplies, and sustaining snow and ice for winter recreation, which supports local economies,” explained Lauren Casey, a meteorologist at Climate Central.  Ironically enough, a few weeks later most of the United States was bracing for the largest snowstorms in several years.  CNN noted that, “Vast swaths of the US have been hit with powerful storms, including blizzards that have blanketed parts of the Midwest and Northeast in snow,” but then proceeded to insist that “many states accustomed to white winters are now getting more rain than snow.”  Somehow, they acknowledge the obvious, “that snowfall is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, and scientific data from ground observations, satellites, and climate models have given contradictory signals on the role of climate change in declining snowpacks. Some areas have even experienced more snow in our warmer world.”  Even, so a new study “published by researchers at Dartmouth College in the journal Nature, offers the big picture — climate change has caused significant drops in snow in the world’s north since the 1980s. Areas in the US Southwest and Northeast, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe, have experienced the steepest global warming-related declines of between 10% and 20% per decade.”  It would be nice if they even bothered to explain how any of this works – first, we can’t measure snow accurately – but suddenly we can say it’s declining by 20%.  Says who and why?  How did they solve the measurement problem?  Needless to say, they don’t say, except we might not be skiing anymore at some point in some undefined future unless you give up your car, stove, and start eating insects.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, is piling hyperbole on top of hyperbole in its forecast for 2024, claiming the data suggests “there will be no imminent slowdown in a surge of global warmth that has supercharged the decades-long trend tied to fossil fuel emissions.”  For an organization that prides itself on reporting actual news rather than opinion, one might wonder why they fail to define “surge” given 2016 still ranks as the second hottest year on record according to their (unverifiable, corrupted figures).  Logically speaking, you can just as easily say that there has been barely any warming at all during this period given that there was a .17% degree differential since 2016 and the intervening years were cooler than 2016 itself.  Alas, the editorial team apparently isn’t aware of the meaning of “supercharged,” because normally that would imply the warming simply hasn’t stopped and has gone up and up every year, which doesn’t accurately reflect the corrupt data they are sharing.  It is only after the hyperbole that they arrive at the proverbial elephant in the room, El Niño.  “El Niño is known to raise planetary temperatures by as much as a few tenths of a degree Celsius, a decent margin for a globally averaged statistic. That’s because it’s associated with warmer-than-average surface temperatures across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, and those waters release heat and steam into the atmosphere.”  2023 was also an El Niño year, and if indeed El Niño can increase temperatures by a few tenths of a degree, the .17 degree increase over 2016, once again, completely disappears.  In fact, 2016 was an El Niño year as well and would have been cooler, meaning that over the last decade we have not warmed at all.  Far be it from me to try to say this with any certainty, but this conclusion can be assembled from their own data as I have done here.  In other words, the three hottest years on record were all El Niño.  Once again, if you take El Niño away, to be clear I do not recommend adding and subtracting temperatures like this, I am only doing it because that’s what the scientists do, there is no warming trend at all over the past ten years!  Isn’t it amazing how this works?

In fact, scientists are anticipating that 2024 ends with La Niña which can have a cooling effect.  In other words, they can say next to nothing with any surety, which should not be surprising, except that global warming simply has to be changing everything and then some.  “There are some aspects of what is going on that remain puzzling,” explained Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Climate change means all past analogs are not so reliable.”  We might rephrase this to “no past analog is reliable if it doesn’t advance the global warming narrative and corresponding radically progressive agenda.”  We know this because so-called climate scientists regularly slice and dice temperatures and other atmospheric phenomenon when it suits their purposes, bizarrely claiming that a storm is this percent more powerful or heat wave that much hotter, but when it comes to the obvious fact that the two key years upon which they base the entire decade long trend were increased several tenths of a degree by El Niño according to their own admission, they are remarkably reticent to do the same.  Instead, they want to use this corrupted data and obviously ad hoc trends to force you to live without the energy, transportation, and other facets of life you rely on for your very existence.  Submit to their will or the planet will burn.