Using data from heavily adjusted land-based temperature readings, NOAA and NASA declared yesterday 2015 to be the ‘hottest year ever,’ even though they’ve excluded the satellite record, and worse, ocean temperatures. That’s important because “70 percent of the Earth is oceans,” and “we can’t measure those temperatures very well,” says MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen. “The ocean temps can also be “off a half a degree, a quarter of a degree. Even two-10ths of a degree of change would be tiny but two-100ths is ludicrous.”
2015 was remarkable for two reasons: an ongoing naturally occurring El Ni√±o event, where the tropical Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures are unusually warm and affect the climate all over the world. This anomaly is responsible for above-normal temps across the planet, and affects countries from Australia to Zimbabwe. There was also the multi-year Pacific blob off the West Coast fueling California’s drought.
NOAA writes that 2015 was 0.16 degrees Celsius (± 0.09 degrees Celsius) warmer than the previous record, which was 2014, and NASA also states that 2015 was 0.13 degrees Celsius (± 0.10 degrees Celsius) above 2014. Both NOAA/NASA show 2015 averaged .15 degrees higher than 2014, with a margin of error equal to ± 0.095 degrees Celsius.
NASA also writes on its site: “Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been much greater than the old record by that much.” The year 1998 also had a remarkable El Ni√±o event, considered to be the largest since tracking began in the ’50s. All told, 2015 was “0.87 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average,” reports the Daily Caller.
The director of NASA’s GISS, Gavin Schmidt, said: “Last year’s temperature had an assist from El Ni√±o but it was the cumulative effect of the long term trend that has resulted in the record warming we are seeing.” But Dr. David Whitehouse, co-founder of the London-based think tank Global Warming Policy Forum, said: “This assertion is not supported by the NASA GISS data. In 2015 no month between January ‚Äì September set a record for that month.”
Dr. Richard Lindzen, who is an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, told Climate Depot: “Frankly, I feel it is proof of dishonesty to argue about things like small fluctuations in temperature or the sign of a trend. Why lend credibility to this dishonesty?” The difference is so small as to be within the statistical margin of error.
Lindzen says that all that matters is that for nearly 40 years, climate model projections have exceeded observations. “Even if all the observed warming were due to greenhouse emissions, it would still point to low sensitivity,” Lindzen says. “But, given the ‘pause.’ we know that natural internal variability has to be of the same order as any other process.” In other words, the Earth is far less sensitive to an increase to the trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2), which went up about 2 parts per million in 2015.
The ‘pause’ shows an 18-plus year standstill in global temperatures based on satellite data, the gold standard in measuring the Earth’s temperature. At least that’s what NASA told scientists 25 years ago. When the satellites stopped showing an increase in global temperatures, activists abandoned them for the less reliable, over-cooked, highly adjusted land-based temperature set. With that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) can claim 2015 was the hottest year since recordkeeping began over 200 years ago.
They can also make another claim that is a figment of data manipulation: Earth is one degree warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution. They consider that to be a “key milestone,” the AP writes, “because world leaders have set a threshold of trying to avoid warming of 1.5 or degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.” That’s why the satellite record is such a sticking point. It shows a 0.27 degree Celsius warming above the global average.
As for 2015? The satellite record shows it as being only the third or fourth warmest since satellite tracking began in 1978. The satellite data, which is compiled and maintained by the University of Alabama/Huntsville, found “2015 to be third warmest on record, and Remote Sensing Systems satellite data ranked 2015 as the fourth warmest in the nearly four-decade-old satellite record.”
Satellites measure the Earth’s temperatures from five miles up and NASA recommended they be adopted as the best way to monitor global temperature changes because they are not prone to adjustments, human error and bias, poorly situated sites, and more. Satellites show far less warming than the land-based temperature record, and as such, activists (including NOAA and NASA scientists!) have launched a new campaign on YouTube to discredit their readings.
