COP21 Group LoveJust days before President Obama is scheduled to sign the global climate accord at the United Nations, NOAA declared March the warmest month on record. This Friday, which is also Earth Day, about 150 countries will officially ink the climate agreement reached in Paris last December. While the climate accord is not a legally binding treaty, it does put the United States on a path toward slashing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025.
Dr Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, says these efforts are nothing more than political pomp and “expensive hot air” and won’t “significantly avert global warming.” He calculates it will end up being the “costliest climate change treaty” in history. And the next U.S. president can’t withdraw until 2019, something Mr. Obama is counting on.
So it’s not surprising that only yesterday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released a new report asserting that March was the hottest month in the 137 years of spotty recordkeeping (they even admit they are starting to sound like a “broken record”). NOAA says that the average global temperature for the first three months of 2016 was “2.07 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average” and adds the misleading 2015 hottest year ever claim.
But as pointed out by Tony Heller, who has been collating, charting, and studying climate data for his site Real Science, the global temperature record has been altered so ruthlessly by NASA and NOAA as to be virtually unusable. He notes that the 1950’s cooling trend, which showed a 0.6 degrees Celsius cooling from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, and “little or no net warming from the 1950s to 1990,” no longer exists.
He demonstrates how after all the alterations, previous datasets that showed a cycle of cooling and warming now only show a warming trend. One reason, Heller speculates, that “NASA and NOAA are hiding the post-1940 decline in temperature and 1970’s ice age scare” is that it doesn’t fit in with the current administration’s political mandates.
During the 1930s, the United States had the vast majority of temperature recording stations. It was arguably the hottest decade with the highest number of annual heat waves, as seen in NASA and NOAA’s datasets, as well as NOAA’s U.S. Climate Extreme’s Index (CEI) dataset. After the underlying data was altered, the CEI “sharply diverged from the underlying data” at around 1980. Heller says the primary reason for this sharp uptick after 1980 is that NOAA added station data they never had in the first place. From 1980, “fabricated data used by NOAA has increased from 12 percent to 47 percent.”
