“Hottest seasonally adjusted month EVER!”

 

The guitarist in Spinal Tap gets his amp to go louder by turning it up to ‘11.’ See.

NASA achieve a “record highest temperature” by relying on a weather pattern: an El Nino, and then blaming it all on us. That’s like turning it up to 20.

They did it back in 1998 when an unexpectedy powerful EL Nino drove temperattures to what they called then “record highs.” (They weren’t, they were still below temperatures from the 1940s.) They’re doing it again this year.

From Radio New Zealand, who reported the news gleefully:

Last year's global average temperature was the hottest ever by the widest margin on record, two US government agencies say.
    Data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that in 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 0.90°C above the 20th century average, surpassing 2014's previous record by 0.16 degrees.
    During the final month, the December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was the highest on record for any month in the 136-year record.
    This was the fourth time a global temperature record had been set this century, the agencies said in a summary of their annual report.
    "2015 was remarkable even in the context of the larger, long-term warming trend," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
    The sharp increase in 2015 was driven in part by El Nino, a natural weather cycle in the Pacific that warms the ocean surface every two to seven years. But [Sshmidt] says human activities - notably burning fossil fuels - were the main driver behind the rise.

Good to see the El Nino acknowledged. This time. But given the flaws in their science (“climate models, which are the sole grounds for fears about dangerous anthropogenic warming, predict much more warming than actually observed … from 2.5 to 3 times as much”; and Gavin Schmidt and his colleagues are still struggling to fully understand climate sensitivity), their further claim, that “human activities were the main driver behind the rise,” is little more than hopeful speculation.

And with every claim of a “record highest temperature” you have to ask both “since when?” “measured how?” and “measured by whom?”

NOAA and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have histories of tweaking global data and abbreviating recorded timelines to make the past colder in order to have recent temperatures appear remarkably warmer.
    In January they rolled out a “hottest year ever” press briefing to report an allegedly dramatic warming trend purportedly based upon 57 years of radiosonde (balloon) records. Strangely, their presentation graph only showed the last 37 years dating back to 1979. Data going back another 22 years to 1957 would have revealed a very different trend line.
    As reported by ‘Real Science,’ radiosonde recordings in the Earth’s atmosphere show no overall warming since the late 1950s. And whereas NOAA’s surface station records indicate about one degree (1º) of warming between 1979 and 2010, far more accurate radiosonde and satellite measurements show little warming.
    Global temperatures cooled from the late 1950s to the 1960s, and have since risen and fallen with as much pre-1979 cooling as post-1979 warming over the past half century.
    Satellite records which date back only to 1979 show that 1998, a major El Niño year, was far warmer than 2015, which experienced an even stronger El Niño that had been expected to influence at least equally high temperatures.
    In fact even the year 2010 (which was followed by four years of cooling) was warmer.

So, maybe, don’t believe the hype.

RELATED POSTS:

• “The news is all over the media — Feb 2016 was a record hottest ever month — and the Global Worriers  are saying “Meltdown“, “Planetary Crisis” and “Terrifying Milestone.”
      “But the Pause is still there. No matter what happens now, the world didn’t warm for 18 years, and that shows the models can’t predict a thing….
      “One big El Nino didn’t fix the climate models now. (They can’t predict El Nino’s either).
      “Nothing that happens after 2015 can change the amount of energy that went missing during the Pause that no mainstream modeller predicted. Remember these models are supposed to be coupled ocean and atmosphere models, but none of them understand what causes shifts in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [which causes the El Nino and La Nina anomalies], or many other natural cycles and currents of the ocean. So with every natural spike up, modelers unscientifically leap in glee, and with the other 99% of the data, they blame internal variability. But a real scientist is scientific every month. Trends, guys, trends. That’s what this debate was supposed to be about. Not spikes. Not noise.
      “During the last whopper El Nino in 1997-98, CO2 levels were 365ppm, They’re now 400ppm. This El Nino should be hotter than the last big one. For a lot of the last 10 years the Global Worriers have been claiming that we can’t start a pause with an El Nino. So why is OK to stop a Pause with one?”
  Hottest seasonally adjusted month EVER! Hyperbole runs wild. – JO NOVA
• “Alarmists see that recent upswing and attribute it to manmade global warming, but it’s comparable to the rise in global temperatures in response to the 1997/98 El Niño.  With the current decay of the 2015/16 El Niño, the possible transition to a La Niña and the dissipation of The Blob, global surface temperatures are not going to stay at that new peak value.  They’re going to drop and future newcomers to the global temperature record are going to wonder what caused the odd-looking spike in 2015/16.”
  Alarmism Cranked Up to Absurd Level – Bob Tisdale, WATTS UP WITH THAT
• “Just in case you thought sea surface temperatures around the globe responded similarly to strong El Niños: This post will illustrate quite clearly that the responses of ocean surface temperatures differ noticeably with El Niño events of similar strength—those in 1997/98 and 2015/16.”
  Global Sea Surface Temperature Responses to the 1997/98 and 2015/16 El Niño Events – Bob Tisdale, WATTS UP WITH THAT
• “…they are not using data. They are comparing the models to adjusted data. The point being that data is not data after it has been adjusted.”
  February 2016 Global Surface (Land+Ocean) and Lower Troposphere Temperature Anomaly Update – Bob Tisdale, WATTS UP WITH THAT
  

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