Climate Confusion: When The Data And The Conclusions Don't Match

 I saw this headline this morning: "Last decade was the HOTTEST on record, figures reveal – as scientists warn we are 'losing the race to save our melting glaciers'." And last week, Phys.org ran this one: "2023 set to be hottest year on record: UN." So why does the data say this: "EPA: Few Stations Show Increase in Hot Days."

    As reported by EPA, only 19% of all weather stations report an increase in the number of hot days since 1948!

    Below is an important chart that somehow slipped by EPA’s “consensus” censorship squad. It is a map of all 1,066 weather stations across the United States. The change in the number of hot days for that station are ID’d as increasing (red), stayed the same (blank) or decreasing (blue).

    A total of 863 stations, or 81%, reported either a decrease or no change in the number of hot days! 

This global warming is not very global in its warming. In fact, one could argue that even those that showed increases were primarily due to the weather stations being in "heat islands"--near sources of heat that artificially raise the recorded temperatures--a common problem.

    And then there is academic bias. Earlier this year, Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, accused science journals of rejecting papers that did not support certain climate narratives, earning a rebuke from Nature.

Brown claimed in an article for The Free Press that editors at Nature and Science - two of the most prestigious scientific journals - select 'climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives' and favor 'distorted' research which hypes up dangers.

Research from earlier this year showed that methane--still widely touted as the most dangerous of the global warming gasses--its influence is found to be mitigated by methane blocking short wave-length radiation from the sun and increasing cloud production. In other words, the science wasn't as simple as the climate scientists say. Even Bill Gates (!) has admitted that there is a lot of climate exaggeration. 

    The reality is that the climate change you hear about in the media, from the government, and from powerful NGOs is not science. It is, instead, a form of scaremongering intended to frighten the public into accepting higher taxes, increased regulations, and a lower standard of living which would otherwise be unacceptable (and note that it never involves sacrifice by the wealthy--who just become wealthier from investments in government subsidized "green" industries). Rather, as discussed by Anthony Watts in "New WUWT Global Temperature Feature: Anomaly vs. Real-World Temperature," 

    But in the real-world, people don’t experience climate as yearly or monthly temperature anomalies, they experience weather on a day to day basis, where one day may be abnormally warm, and another might be abnormally cold. Sometimes new records are set on such days. This is normal, but such records are often portrayed by the media as being evidence of “climate change” when if fact it is nothing more than natural variations of Earth’s atmosphere and weather systems. In fact, is doubtful humans would even notice the mild warming we’ve had in the last century at all, given that the human body often can’t tell the difference between 57°F and 58°F in any given moment, much less over a long term.

    Essentially, what we know as climate change is nothing more than a man-made statistical construct. You can’t go outside and hold an instrument in the air and say “I’m measuring the climate.” Climate is always about averages of temperature over time. It’s a spreadsheet of data where daily high and low temperatures are turned into monthly averages, and monthly averages are turned into yearly averages, and yearly averages are turned into graphs spanning a century.

    But, such graphs used in press releases to the media and broadcast to the public don’t really tell the story of the data honestly. They omit a huge amount of background information, such as the fact that in the last 40 years, we’ve had a series of El Niño weather events that have warmed the Earth; for example, 1983, 1998 and in 2016. The two biggest El Niño events are shown coinciding with temperature increases in Figure 3.

    These graphs also don’t tell you the fact that much of the global surface temperature measurements are highly polluted with Urban Heat Island (UHI) and local heat-sink related siting effects that bias temperatures upward, such as the wholesale corruption of climate monitoring stations I documented in 2022, where 96% of the stations surveyed don’t even meet published standards for accurate climate observations. In essence – garbage in, garbage out.

    But, all that aside, the main issue is how the data is portrayed in the media, such as The Guardian example shown in Figure 2.

    To that end, I have prepared a new regular feature on WUWT, that will be on the right sidebar, combined with the long-running monthly temperature graphs from the state of the art (not polluted or corrupted) NOAA operated U. S. Climate Reference Network and the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) satellite derived temperature global record.

    I’m utilizing the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies GISTEMP global dataset. The difference is simply this – I show both the absolute (measured) and the anomaly (statistically magnified) versions of the global temperature. This is accomplished by doing the reverse procedure as outlined in UCAR’s How to Measure Global Average Temperature in Five Easy Steps.

    In this calculation, the “normal” temperature of the Earth is assumed to be 57.2°F. and that is simply added to the anomaly temperature reported by NASA GISS to obtain the absolute temperature. The basis of this number comes from NASA GISS itself, from their FAQ page as seen in August 2016 as captured by the Wayback Machine.

    Of course GISS removed it from that page as seen today, because they don’t want people doing exactly what I’m doing now – providing the absolute temperature data, in a non-scary graphical presentation, done in the scale of how humans experience Earth’s temperature where they live. ...

The consequence is that the "global warming" over the past 140 years is less than the day-to-day variance in temperature.