NASA/NOAA Say 2014 Warmest on Record...Unless it Isn't...Until it is

Fun with global temperatures. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued a statement saying that 2014 will go down in the history of record keeping (1850) as the warmest ever.

Sort of. They’re kind of vague on the details, like how much warmer and is the difference between last year and other years statistically significant.

And then there’s the question of the temperature in the lower atmosphere vs. the upper atmosphere and how those numbers rank compared to previous years.

In short, there are a lot of ways to measure temperatures on a global scale. Climate etc. points us to this rather technical discussion of the matter.

Climate etc. gives us the bottom line from that well known bastion of climate denialism…Berkeley Earth:

Berkeley Earth sums it up well with this statement:

That is, of course, an indication that the Earth’s average temperature for the last decade has changed very little.

The key issue remains the growing discrepancy between the climate model projections and the observations: 2014 just made the discrepancy larger.

Speculation about ‘warmest year’ and end of ‘pause’ implies a near term prediction of surface temperatures – that they will be warmer. I’ve made my projection – global surface temperatures will remain mostly flat for at least another decade. However, I’m not willing to place much $$ on that bet, since I suspect that Mother Nature will manage to surprise us. (I will be particularly surprised if the rate of warming in the next decade is at the levels expected by the IPCC.)

Here’s a summary of Berkeley Earth’s main findings of the NASA report:

1. The global surface temperature average for 2014 was nominally the warmest since the global instrumental record began in 1850; however, within the margin of’error, it’s tied with 2005 and 2010 and so we can’t be certain it set a new record.

2. For the land, 2014 was nominally the 4th warmest year since 1753

3. For the sea, 2014 was the warmest year on record since 1850

4. For the contiguous United States, 2014 ranked nominally as the 38th warmest year on record since 1850.

A little something for both sides of the debate. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that figures like these are going to be manipulated, twisted, folded, spindled, and mutilated to have them say exactly what one side or the other intends them to say. It is the price we pay for politicizing science.

What NASA and other global warming advocates never talk about is the huge difference between what the climate models relied on by the IPCC and governments to formulate policy are saying about the rise in temperatures and the actual temperature readings reported every year. The massive disconnect between prediction and reality should make a powerful argument for prudent leaders and scientists to slow down the rush to destroy industrialized civilization in the name of saving the planet.

But prudence left the building 2 decades ago and shows no sign of returning. Meanwhile, the president and his EPA will forge ahead with wrong headed policies that won’t lower the temperature of planet earth by even a smidgeon but will cripple the US economy and destroy jobs.