Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #269

WUWT
Lindzen starts with the meme: 97% of scientists agree, which was exposed as a myth by Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer in the Wall Street Journal. Another mime is “warmest years on record,” which covers many misconceptions. The prior warmest year, since about 1850 in the surface record, was 1998. A slight increase above that is immediately seized as evidence of dire global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions, even though it cannot be felt by humans, given the enormous temperature range existing on the globe each day.
As Lindzen shows, from 1850 the “Globally Averaged Deviations from Average Temperatures Plotted on a Scale Relevant to the Individual Station Deviations” are remarkably stable over time. It is only by manipulating scales for visual impact, called “chartsmanship’, that the change appears significant. When Lindzen adds the range of uncertainty in the measurements, the record is far from clear. The same applies to the influence of carbon dioxide (CO2).
Similarly, Lindzen demolishes other memes; including extreme weather, sea level rise, Arctic sea ice, polar bear endangerment, ocean acidification, and death of coral reefs. These memes lead those who are not sceptics to accept that CO2 causes global warming and that global warming is the cause of everything. ..."