Take with one almighty pinch of salt all those Hottest Year Evah claims which have been proliferating of late in the left-liberal media: they have very little to do with science and almost everything to do with the glorious fact that the world’s first fully-fledged “climate-denying” president is about to enter the White House.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that President Trump denies that climate changes (it does, constantly, as everyone knows).
It simply means that, in common with many incoming members of his administration, President Trump is going to base his climate and energy policy on hard, verifiable science, empirical observation, and rational cost benefit analysis rather than hysterical, politically-motivated green scaremongering.
Scaremongering, for example, like this Hottest Year Evah narrative being promoted everywhere from the New York Times to the BBC.
Temperature data for 2016 shows it is likely to have edged ahead of 2015 as the world’s warmest year.
Data from Nasa and the UK Met Office shows temperatures were about 0.07 degrees Celsius above the 2015 mark.
One purpose of these stories, reproduced by compliant environmental correspondents in the parti-pris liberal media, is of course to try to persuade an increasingly sceptical public that global warming is still a thing.
But the more important one is to provide green and left-wing activists with a weapon with which to bludgeon the political class – by giving the false impression that their assault on capitalism and economic growth has some kind of genuine scientific basis.
And the problem is that the supposedly neutral gatekeepers in charge of the temperature records – NASA, NOAA, the Met Office, etc – are in on the scam. This graph – courtesy of Steve Goddard – shows the extent of NASA’s dishonest adjustments. Unadjusted and satellite records combine to suggest that there has been no more than 0.6 degrees C warming since the middle of the 19th century. NASA’s adjustments have doubled this.
The current nonsense being spouted by alarmists that for three years in a row – 2014, 2015, and 2016 – we have had the hottest years since records began. This is complete rubbish: as Paul Homewood explains here, it only works if you ignore the much more accurate satellite records and focus on the adjusted (and corrupt) surface temperature records, as modified by the activists who’ve taken over NASA and NOAA.
As you can see from this satellite chart below, 2014 and 2015 were nowhere near record-breaking years.
The alarmists have been playing similar dirty tricks on tornadoes: NOAA has been trying to make out that they’ve been getting worse – when it fact, as Homewood shows, the opposite is true.
According to NOAA, the number of tornadoes has been steadily growing since the 1950s, despite a drop in numbers in the last five years.
They show the above chart prominently in their Tornadoes – Annual 2016 Report.
However, they know full well that it is meaningless to compare current data with the past, as they explain themselves in the section Historical Records and Trends, which is hidden away on their own website:
One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado must have been observed. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable. If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented. Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century.
You can read his full takedown here.
Homewood doesn’t pull his punches. NOAA’s breach of trust here borders on the criminal.
The bottom line is that the NOAA headline graph is grossly dishonest. Indeed, if a company published something like that in their Annual Accounts, they would probably end up in jail!
Which is why, of course, the dodgy scientists at places like NASA and NOAA are so dreading the incoming administration. They know that their days are numbered, that the dubiousness of their corrupt science is about to be exposed to the world. Rather than admit the truth though – which they are congenitally incapable of doing: they’re in far too deep for that – they are instead trying to make out that it’s Donald Trump who is the problem, that he is some kind of anti-science wrecker who is determined to destroy all the good noble work that the selfless climate scientists have been doing all these years.
Hence publicity stunts like the recent one where 100 climate scientists wrote a letter to British Prime Minister Theresa May, urging her to use her influence to correct President Trump’s supposed denialism.
“We urge you, as Prime Minister, to use the United Kingdom’s special relationship with the United States, as well as international fora such as the G7 and G20, to press President-Elect Trump and his administration to acknowledge the scientific evidence about the risks of climate change, to continue to support international action to counter climate change, including the Paris Agreement, and to maintain support for world class research and data-gathering on climate change in the United States.”
This deluded, self-regarding garbage, it has since emerged, was very likely authored by Bob Ward – the paid propagandist of a green hedge fund billionaire called Jeremy Grantham, who has pumped millions into various environmental think tanks whose job is to promote the climate change narrative.
President Trump has his work cut out if he is to clear the Augean stables of the plethora of climate pigs with their snouts in the trough. But it won’t just be business for him. It will also be pure pleasure.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.