Democracy Has Prevailed.

February 24, 2014

The Trib Gets The Climate Wrong. Again

From today's Op-Ed page at Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review:
With 15 years of flat temperatures invalidating the “models” climate-clucking “scientists” cherish, blame-mankind politicians resort to shouting down opponents, bogus doomsday scenarios, false claims that scientific “consensus” favors their side and calls for economically ruinous “action” — as Secretary of State John Kerry did in a speech in Indonesia.

He likened skeptics of man-made climate change to the Flat Earth Society, called global warming a weapon of mass destruction and warned against letting “a few loud interest groups” — major oil and coal companies — “hijack the climate conversation.”
Unfortunately for Scaife's braintrust, Kerry's right.

And the braintrust is wrong - wrong from their very first six words, "With 15 years of flat temperatures..."

They tried this back in June, 2013 and they they're still wrong.

Back then we pointed to this page and this graph:


When an 11 year "running mean" is done, it smooths out the various spikes that may occur in the data (sun spots, el Nino and so on) and leaves the underlying trend.

But if you look at the page, it says that it's the underlying trend for surface temperature deviation from the 1951-1980 mean.  Is there anything else going on that would invalidate the braintrust's repeatedly failed attempt to invalidate the science?

Why, yes.  Yes, there is:
To claim global warming stopped in 1998 overlooks one simple physical reality - the land and atmosphere are just a small fraction of the Earth's climate (albeit the part we inhabit). The entire planet is accumulating heat due to an energy imbalance. The atmosphere is warming. Oceans are accumulating energy. Land absorbs energy and ice absorbs heat to melt. To get the full picture on global warming, you need to view the Earth's entire heat content.
So what does this bigger picture actually look like? Like this:


In an interesting bit of projection from a climate science denier, the Trib quotes Fred Singer:
What climate alarmists have left to fall back on is anything but science. [S. Fred} Singer says they “embrace faith and ideology — and are no longer interested in facts.” And that's no fit basis for any policy, let alone the radical, redistributive, anti-growth climate leftism Mr. Kerry espouses.
But when you actually look at the data, at the science, and then at what Scaife's braintrust says about it, you'll know immediately who is embracing faith and ideology (they are) and who's got the science right (NOAA, NASA, National Academy of Science, United States National Research Council, and so on).

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