Michael Mann: He’s back!The climate scientist at the center of the Climategate email scandal is out with a new study claiming man-made warming is responsible for record-breaking warmth in recent years.
The study’s timing, however, couldn’t have been any worse — a major blizzard has millions of Americans sitting under record levels of snowfall.
Climate scientists Michael Mann of Penn State University, along with other scientists, published a new study Monday claiming “record-setting temperatures were extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused climate change.”
But Mann’s study comes after Winter Storm Jonas ripped through the Eastern Seaboard, causing traffic jams, power outages and reportedly 30 fatalities. In the end, Americans from North Carolina to New York City were covered in 2 feet of snow.
AccuWeather reports that Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York City and Philadelphia “shattered daily records for the most snow on Jan. 23.” No doubt, millions of people spent Sunday shoveling their driveways and digging out their cars.
While activists have tried to link the blizzard to global warming, many scientists have chosen to focus on surface temperature data showing a string of record-breaking years over the last decade. They claim this is due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.
“These same record temperatures were, by contrast, quite likely to have occurred in the presence of anthropogenic climate forcing,” Mann and his co-authors wrote, adding that nature and the sun had little to do with the Earth being so warm in the last decade or so.
But many of these record years took place during the so-called “hiatus” of global warming — a period of 15 years or so with no significant global warming. That’s because while temperatures remain constant every year will be near or at record levels, but only by a tiny margin.
For example, 2014 was declared the warmest year on record by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but they were only between 38 percent and 48 percent sure this was correct.
“With 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year, this implies that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade,” Judith Curry, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology said of government scientists’ announcement last year.
“This ‘almost’ record year does not help the growing discrepancy between the climate model projections and the surface temperature observations,” Curry said.
