Spectator
So it is with this ‘hottest year on record’ story. There are several
reasons why it doesn’t stand up. The first is that it’s wilfully
misleading. You read that headline and you think: ‘Wow! Hottest ever?
That is serious.’ But it’s not when you consider the context. ‘On
record’ means, in this case, since widespread global thermometer records
began — which is as recently as 1880. There have been many, many
occasions in history when the earth’s average temperature is reckoned to
have been warmer than it is now: in the medieval and Roman warming
periods, for example. Indeed, as the Canadian -scientist Dr Tim Ball has
calculated by studying the evidence of ice-core data, earth’s recent
temperatures rank in the lowest 3 per cent of those recorded since the
end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. ................
And in any case, 2014’s claim to being the warmest on record is at
best moot. As Goddard Institute director Gavin Schmidt has since
grudgingly conceded, it is impossible to be sure which of the recent
years has been warmest because the temperature differences — we’re
talking 2/100ths of a degree — are smaller than the margin of error.
But the biggest problem is this, and few journalists are willing to
touch it because it opens such a huge can of worms: the surface
temperature readings used by and quoted by all the experts mentioned
above no longer accurate or trustworthy. When you write this, it invites
the obvious question: ‘You’re not seriously arguing, are you, that all
the world’s top meteorological institutions are cooking the books
because they’ve got the same hidden agenda?’ And instantly you look like
a crackpot conspiracy theorist.
There’s plenty of evidence to support it, mind. Exhibit no. 1: the
satellite records which, unlike the land-based records, show no rise in
temperature in the past 18 years. Exhibit no. 2: the actual raw data
from weather stations all over the world. This, it invariably turns out,
tells a very different story from the narrative which has been imposed
on it by the Keepers of the Flame of the Great Global Warming Scare."
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