Today one mainstream newspaper finally caught up with the global warming skeptic community and recognized that a recent release of data from the United Kingdom’s Met Office shows that since 1996 the temperature of the climate has stalled. For the past sixteen years there has been no global warming, at all.
Three takeaways from this story.
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“There is no statistical case to be made for a global temperature increase in the past 15 years.”
The database is the one created by the Met Office in Great Britain. Also this:
None of these adjustments are, considering the errors of measurement, statistically significant, but they do affect the ranking of years, which is important if the associated errors are not considered, as is often the case in the media. The overall conclusion is that global temperature datasets are fluid and change from month to month, and this must be taken into account in any analysis. It would be nice to have explanations for such changes.[emphasis mine]
Because of the unexplained adjustments, 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record, a “fact” trumpeted loudly by global warming scientists for more than a decade.
The Met Office in the UK has issued an updated temperature record for the past 150 years, suggesting that the climate has warmed 0.75 degrees Celsius since 1900.
I remain suspicious of this announcement, as the scientists issuing this report are the same scientists who participated in climategate, including Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University. With that in mind, before I will believe these numbers I will wait for some vetting of this new data by those who have shown themselves to be a bit more skeptical, a bit more open-minded, and a lot more honest.
One more point: to really understand the importance of an increase of 0.75 degrees Celsius over 112 years, we would need some context, something this news article does not give us. For example, how do these numbers compare with the numbers predicted by the various climate models? Also, this is the overall change. How have things changed from year to year? Is there any evidence in this data for a cooling during the past decade, as indicated by other climate measurements?
Data issued last week without fanfare by both the UK’s Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit has confirmed that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
The article also discusses at great length the additional influence the sun and its sunspot cycle might have on the climate, something I have discussed here at great length. However, the above factoid is the article’s most important data point.
This is wrong, if true: The chief of the UK’s Met Office said yesterday that he has received death threats from climate change skeptics.
A Met Office spokesman confirmed Mr Hirst had received death threats made in a number of ”unsavoury emails”, but said they were ”isolated incidents” and the organisation had not felt it necessary to involve the police.
