Guest post by Ryan Maue
Green journalists and partisan bloggers are baffled about the lack of sufficient coverage of the “2010 hottest year ever” — and utter failure to ram through climate legislation in the 111th Congress. After scratching your head in amazement at the conundrum these journalists find themselves, something about pots, kettles, and a mirror comes to mind.
Here is a sample of headlines from the green media establishment:
Huffington Post: 2010 Hottest Year on Record: The graph that should be on the front page of every newspaper
The Hill: Frustration on global warming deepens for supporters of climate change bill
Guardian UK (warning Bob Ward, palaeopiezometry): Why have UK Media ignored climate change announcements?
I’ll give you a very easy answer: it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and so far, it’s been historically cold. And, the media should be more wary about using such vitriolic language like “denier” considering the explosive connotation that the term implies.
They are all constipated about the lack of overwhelming coverage of 2010, and the sizzling planet (we’re talking about hundredths of degrees here): Read about NASA’s press release below…
Here is NASA’s press release, which apparently wasn’t sufficiently disseminated for certain segments of the climate establishment. According to Hansen, 2010 differed from 2005 by less than 2 hundredths of a degree F (that’s 0.018F). They have to admit an inconvenient truth:
One of the problems with focusing on annual rankings, rather than the longer trend, is that the rankings of individual years often differ in the most closely watched temperature analyses — from GISS, NCDC, and the Met Office — a situation that can generate confusion.
Confusion?
“Certainly, it is interesting that 2010 was so warm despite the presence of a La Niña and a remarkably inactive sun, two factors that have a cooling influence on the planet, but far more important than any particular year’s ranking are the decadal trends,” Hansen said.
Wait a minute, wait a minute: a remarkably inactive sun …
“The three official records vary slightly because of subtle differences in the way we analyze the data, but they agree extraordinarily well,” said Reto Ruedy, one of Hansen’s colleagues at GISS who helps analyze global surface temperatures.
Subtle differences? Extraordinary agreement?
Invariably, a great deal of attention centers on each year’s ranking, but it is critical to focus on the decade-long trends that matter more, the GISS scientists emphasize. On that time scale, the three records are unequivocal: the last decade has been the warmest on record. “It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” said Hansen. “It is the underlying trend that is important.”
Well, then stop issuing press releases which tout the rankings, which are subject to change ex post facto. You never know what year is number 1 due to those “subtle differences”, which apparently aren’t that important anyways.
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“I’ll give you a very easy answer: it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and so far, it’s been historically cold…”
Well said….Though most of the snow has melted in our back garden, there’s still some left AND they forcast temps. dipping below freezing again next week!! And we live in Scandinavia!!!!! What more proof do I need that global temp. change is a LIE!!!!!!
AND don’t they know that new research shows that the more inactive the sun is, the warmer the planet gets? (or is that the other way round?)
Wait a minute….What’s our take again? Are we supposed to say the Earth is warming but it’s natural variation, or that it’s cooling because the Suns sleeping????
I can attest to this because I submitted NOAA’s press release to fark.com with a funny headline, and got a red light
[ryanm: big Ben Maller from Fox Sports Radio is a prolific headline writer for fark, it’s an artform that should have been patented to hold twitter ransom]
“We don’t know yet” typically suffices.
Mark
It is the winter of discontent as far as the common people are concerned.
It is th end of the game
Douglas
Ma and Pa Kettle can read a thermometer. They might drop their news coverage from an agency that told them they were about to burn up and die (if they didn’t drown first) while they’re up to their buns in snow and ice. Telling folks their summer discomfort is evidence of AGW is one thing, but selling them on the idea that colder is evidence of warmer is a really hard sell.
“Green journalists lament the lack of overwhelming coverage of global warming in the liberal media”
It is called Relevance Deprivation Syndrome. Any Aussie politician who has lost power and prestige can tell you more about it.
Maybe it’s just that we all can recognize a Lake Wobegon Moment… where all the years snow is good looking and all the years are above average temperature… and we’re getting just a bit tired of the Garrison Keillor voice droning on about it as we shovel more snow out and put more wood on the fire…
When you see how wrong most of the MSM is about Global Warming, you wonder how wrong they are about everything else. Gossip seems to be more reliable, and the gossip around here is that it’s been a very cold winter, and those windmills aren’t turning, and somebody is telling porkies.
There is always a chance that temperatures will start to go up to meet the rise in co2.
If this happens then we will have to consider that co2 is driving significant temp rise.
The thing is, at the minute temps are virtually flat while co2 shoots up in a total disconnect, there are signs of cooling and gaps in the science.
This will be an interesting decade that will settle the climate wars.
I guess it has stopped selling papers because the customer has seen through the scam. How long before it percolates up to the Prime Ministers and Premiers etc. The backbenchers in Australia have seen through it and deposed Turnbull. Typical of the AGW deceit, Turnbull tried to make a party room decidion to consider an ETS into a cast iron guarantee. He was rolled.
Haven’t we been here before? Yawn…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6228765.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7142694.stm
Maybe it’s because we are smart enough to judge a ‘trend’ over the course of millenia, and not a decade or a century on a planet that has been around for over four billion years. What goes up, must come down. It has gone both ways before, and will again. No matter how much you spend, Mother Nature can’t be bribed and now we are slowly proving we can’t be either. Unfortunately, the politicians still can.
They don’t understand because they can’t get it right. If they we’re exposing the truth, they would ask Tim Flannery why he had said in 2007, in New Scientist (http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/105ns_001.htm)
Ecotretas
Over the past 50 years southern Australia has lost about 20 per cent of its rainfall, and one cause is almost certainly global warming. Similar losses have been experienced in eastern Australia, and although the science is less certain it is probable that global warming is behind these losses too. But by far the most dangerous trend is the decline in the flow of Australian rivers: it has fallen by around 70 per cent in recent decades, so dams no longer fill even when it does rain.
Given that the long term trend in global temperatures since the last ice age is upward, why should confirmation of this after thousands of years of rising temperatures be newsworthy?
Now if there was any evidence of thermal runaway as predicted by Mann that might be a story worth telling, so how’s that particular prediction doing, Doc?
No need to update my plot of long running thermometer records which show utterly no change in long term warming trend in the modern industrial era. Ho hum twiddle dee doo dee ditty doo. http://oi49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg
The Guardian has deleted about 40% of posts to Bob Wards article and has now started disappearing them altogther. Damage limitation in full swing 🙂
The simple fact is that interest in “global warming” has been on a long term decline since around 2007. Around 2007 there were around 20,000 google current news story hits. These days it is around 7000.
The main drop I see has been a marked absence of the “boring bit of scientific research desperately linked to global warming to sex it up. (Some researches lesser spotted goat frogs, appears to find a decline in numbers and makes it “yet another impact of the (“proven”) global warming). Clearly, global warming has not only become boring for the public to read about, it has lost its kudos with the rest of real science.
And, I think the Newsmedia themselves, did not take kindly to what they saw in the climategate emails and the way the “scientific” elite seemed to back bad practice to the hilt for short term political reasons. I’m sure a lot of journalists were thinking that if they’d seen the same thing happen amongst politicians they’d have been torn to shreds for their dishonesty – so they can’t understand why these people were allowed to get away with it scot free. They don’t know what the bad smell is, but they personally don’t want to be associated with it!
On the BBC couch this morning Susanna Reid pushed the GW barrow to the Oceanographer from Southampton University and he responded quite clearly that the floods in Australia, Brazil & Sri Lanka were NOT due to GW, they were simply natural things that happen from time to time. However, he did relent later and say that due to GW the 1-in-50 year flood would probably happen more often – but did say, when guessing how often, “This is conjecture.”
MSM honesty??
It’s also a good time for the WMO, UNEP, GISS, NOAA, UK Met, and other UN and govt climate agencies to further lose credibility to the public. Why do taxpayers maintain so many bureaucracies with little or zero credibility?
So essentially we could blame the Sahara desert for having had a slight temperature rise during its hotest days last summer.
And what matter the activity of the sun when we’re apparently a tad bit closer to the sun during this planetary space race of “oddly” recurring cycles? If that’s true then OMG but we’re ever so lucky there was a bunch of clouds to keep us cold. :p
“It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” said Hansen. “It is the underlying trend that is important.”
So if we draw a line across the tops of these three years the underlying trend would be flat or slightly down.
NO?.
E.M.Smith says: “Maybe it’s just that we all can recognize a Lake Wobegon Moment…”
Or maybe it’s because AGW, like Lake Wobegon, was based on a real place but never actually existed itself.
By the way, the British media are more concerned with rocketing fuel bills which are provoking some Unions to threaten strikes and protests over the massive amount of fuel taxes we are forced to pay.
Ryan, you’re argument “we’re talking about hundredths of degrees here” is a bit like saying 14, 505ft Mt Whitney isn’t very high because it’s only 55ft taller than Mt Elbert.
[ryanm: what decimal system do you use? — you do realize that global warming is measured over a century by tenths of a degree C and in the past 3-decades by a dozen or two hundredths?]
but far more important than any particular year’s ranking are the decadal trends,” Hansen said.
What he meant to say was “Far more important is myability to maintain my position of being able to continue manipulating and distorting historical temperature data, so I can manufacture increasingly scary stories to ensure that I get more and more money from gullible politicians and the naive idealistic section of the public”.
Climate change is the norm, has been for many hundreds of millions of years and will continue to be so for many more hundreds of millions of years. There is no such thing as a static climate norm. This is the real problem that alarmists face, the general public is slowly beginning to realise this. Also, they don’t like overpaid government bureaucrats – and that’s what most ‘climate scientists’ are – demanding increased taxes to combat something (climate change) which is almost entirely natural.
Why should anyone advocate returning to the conditions of ‘the Little Ice Age’, when temperatures were 0.7-1.0 degrees C colder than today and mankind’s ability to feed itself was dramatically reduced?
I wonder what the next severe winter will do to the “cagw cause”.
Will it be the final nail ?
From the graphic: “In the end, the 111th Congress adjourned without doing anything – AT ALL – to address the climate crisis.”
What climate crisis? I don’t see no stinkin’ climate crisis. The 111th Congress took exactly the correct action – do nothing. The 112th Congress would do well to follow suit.