Since 1978, satellites have been measuring the Earth’s temperature and have given us a snapshot of our global climate: it’s not as warm as some people would have you believe. In fact, 2015 didn’t even come close to breaking all-time records, the Daily Caller reported yesterday. Culling data from weather satellites that have been orbiting the Earth since 1978, climate scientists at the University of Alabama/Huntsville (UAH) reported that 2015 has only been the third-warmest year since satellite tracking began.
As for 2015, the temperature was .44 degrees Celsius above the 1981 to 2010 time-frame, it’s above-average warmth owed in large part to a naturally occurring El Ni√±o event occurring in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The last time an El Ni√±o of this magnitude occurred was in 1998, the warmest year in the satellite record. But this current El Ni√±o still ranks third when compared to the ones that occurred since 1950, when recordkeeping began.
Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has written that judging an El Niño on a single day or week of sea surface temperatures and declaring it the worst ever is premature and not how El Niños are ranked. As NOAA points out, you have to look at changes that happen over seasonal timescales, and not just daily, weekly, and even monthly, readings.
The Mail Online is also reporting today that 2015 was not the hottest year on record and that satellite data shows temperatures were lower than previously thought. In fact, both 1998 and 2010 were warmer than 2015, and 2015 had an average global temperature of .27 degrees Celsius above the global average. This amount is so small as to be statistically insignificant.
Even now, NOAA is prematurely calling 2015 the hottest year on record even though the satellite record says something completely different. NOAA is basing their declarations on land- and sea-based temperature readings, which show 2015 was 0.97 degrees Celsius (1.75 degrees Fahrenheit) above “normal.” But the satellite readings, which measure the atmosphere from five miles up 24 / 7 and are unaffected by ‘tampering,’ show only 0.27 degrees Celsius.
According to NOAA, “The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for November 2015 was the highest for November in the 136-year period of record, at 0.97¬∞C (1.75¬∞F) above the 20th century average of 12.9¬∞C (55.2¬∞F), breaking the previous record of 2013 by 0.15¬∞C (0.27¬∞F).” Dr. Roy Spencer, a meteorologist at UAH, writes on his site that the most recent satellite data show that the temperature readings are consistent with an El Ni√±o event.
As previously reported, measuring the temperature on all continents to state unequivocally global warming is occurring is ripe with error. The most complete temperature datasets for land and sea come from the United States, and even those readings have been challenged by leading scientists for being improperly collected, not collected at all, or situated in urban heat islands. Prior to satellites, we simply didn’t have temperature measuring stations strewn about Africa, South America, China, and other continents like we’ve had in the U.S. for the past 200 years.
Many weather stations are also subject to man-made manipulation, re-calibration, missing data, while consistently measuring higher temperatures than their surrounding rural areas. Measuring sea surface temperatures (SST) are also subject to the same issues.
So it came as a surprise when NOAA rewrote the 200-plus-year historical temperature dataset to make the last twenty years appear warmer than the past. NASA followed suit and incorporated NOAA’s data, thereby corrupting its own readings and eliminating the already acknowledged global warming hiatus. Both agencies are headed up by Obama appointees who appear determined to shore up his climate legacy.
Professor Jo Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, told the Mail Online that, “Whether or not 2015 was the warmest, or second or third warmest, is rather less important than the unquestionable observation that nine of the ten hottest years on record have occurred since 2005….” Except every non-adjusted dataset shows that the majority of the so-called hottest years occurred before the 1950s, with 1921, 1931 and 1934 being the three hottest years, well before the industrial revolution really took off.
And only this week, the Met office issued a statement claiming that December 2015 was the wettest month in the UK since recordkeeping began, and blamed the recent flooding on El Ni√±o and global warming. As Breitbart London’s James Delingpole writes, the Met can say that because it chose to go back to only 1910 (where the records have been digitized), even though its records date back to 1776. With the complete dataset available, “the wettest December in England and Wales was in 1876. And that the wettest calendar month was in October 1903.”
Haigh also says that the UAH record is “based on satellite measurements of microwave radiation given off by oxygen in the lower atmosphere” and has a “number of differences between [using the satellite dataset] and that used by, for example, the UK Met Office.” Haigh continues: “The intensity of the radiation measured by the UAH satellites is proportional to the temperature of the air in the lowest few kilometres of the atmosphere, i.e. not actually at the surface.”
In other words, the upper atmosphere isn’t warming up as predicted by the theory of global warming (aka the greenhouse effect). This is an enormous failure and should send climatologists back to the drawing board. If the theory says the upper atmosphere will warm up first, with the surface warming later, it fails. What the satellites are telling us is that the upper atmosphere isn’t warming up anywhere near as fast or close to what land-based measurements are telling us.
Combine that with a global warming pause lasting 18 years and 9 months, and climate activists are pushing this money-making cottage industry into over-hype. Anyone challenging the global warming orthodoxy are branded heretics and anti-science. Worse, anyone skeptical of the link between carbon dioxide (CO2) and increased temperatures are labeled deniers, a none-too-subtle jab to invoke Holocaust deniers. If your case is so strong, you don’t need to resort to name calling (or jiggering the data).
From a historical perspective, since leaving the last glaciation roughly 10,000-10,500 years ago, we have had at least two unusually hot periods (the Roman Warm period, lasting 150 years, and the Medieval Warm Period, lasting 300 years), plus a Little Ice Age, lasting 350 years. Currently, the Earth is in an interglacial period, meaning we are still in an ice age (known as the Quaternary glaciation), as at least one continent is still covered entirely in ice.
