Despite the alarmist “climate” claims made in an official press conference, the latest temperature data from two U.S. government bureaucracies actually show that the “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming that began some 17 years ago is still ongoing. The findings for last year, unveiled to reporters by NASA and NOAA on January 21, also showed that Antarctic sea ice extent in September of 2013 was the highest ever documented since records began.
The establishment media and the taxpayer-funded climate alarmists, as usual, tried to avoid the troublesome issues — or they at least tried to confuse the public by citing dubious theories purporting to explain the conflict between reality and the climate predictions. However, experts said the latest temperature data offered further evidence that United Nations theories and forecasts surrounding alleged catastrophic man-made global warming are simply wrong.
Perhaps the most broadly overlooked element in the latest data presented by NOAA and NASA is the fact that, as The New American has been reporting for months, Antarctic sea ice extent was at never-before-seen highs throughout much of 2013. In March of last year, meanwhile, ice coverage was the second largest on record. The previous record highs were set in 2012, only to be overtaken in 2013.
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Of course, virtually all of the UN and government-funded “climate experts” predicted drastically decreasing levels of sea ice, so the latest data proved to be deeply embarrassing. It also went virtually ignored by the establishment press, which has consistently tried to avoid reporting on the growing chasm between reality and the doomsday forecasts presented by man-made global-warming theorists. After all, the media’s credibility is on the line now, too.
Arctic sea ice coverage, while still below the four-decade average, also grew significantly in 2013 over the previous three years, the latest data from NASA and NOAA showed. Despite predictions of an “ice-free” Arctic in the summer of 2013 made by NASA-linked “climate scientists” and Al Gore, polar sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere grew by more than 50 percent over 2012 levels. More than a few experts now predicting global cooling expect those trends to continue.
Citing the latest data from NOAA and NASA, Dr. David Whitehouse, an astrophysicist and academic advisor to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said that the 2013 global surface-temperature records from both entities show the “pause” in warming continues. The “hiatus,” as other scientists also refer to it, began as far back as 1997, according to estimates cited in Whitehouse’s analysis of the government data released this week. Other experts agree.
“Statistically speaking there has been no significant trend in global temperatures over this period,” Whitehouse explained in a statement posted on the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s website. “All these years fall within the error bars of 0.1 degree Celsius. The trend is less than this and is statistically insignificant. There is no statistical case for representing the post-1997 data as anything other than a constant line. The graphs presented at the press conference omitted those error bars.”
As usual, when confronted with the fact that global temperatures have not been increasing as all 73 of the UN “climate models” forecasted, global-warming theorists at NASA and NOAA sought to pin the blame on a wide range of supposed causes. When asked about the “pause” confirmed by its latest data, the officials cited everything from volcanoes and solar activity to pollution, natural variability, and more. “In other words, they don’t know,” Dr. Whitehouse explained bluntly.
Indeed, the brazen denial has become a pattern in recent years among alarmists confronted with the implosion of UN “climate” models, predictions, and theories. In essence: Blame anything and everything for the lack of warming that was predicted by every single one of the UN models rather than finally admitting that the alarmist predictions, and therefore the theories underpinning them, were simply wrong.
The UN and governments around the world, which are now spending more than $1 billion of taxpayer money per day on “climate” schemes, have been at the forefront of the frantic search for explanations. The Obama administration, for example, was exposed in leaked documents last year trying to prod the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) into attributing the near-universally acknowledged “pause” in temperature increases to what critics ridicule as “The Theory of the Ocean Ate My Global Warming.”
Dr. Whitehouse did the math. “Given that the IPCC estimates that the average decadal increase in global surface temperature is 0.2 degrees Celsius, the world is now 0.3 degrees C cooler than it should have been,” he explained. Indeed, faced with worldwide criticism and ridicule after its wild predictions failed to materialize, the UN quietly but drastically slashed its temperature forecasts early this year — implicitly acknowledging that all of its previous predictions and models were way off the mark, to put it mildly.
Breaking the latest government numbers and data down further, Whitehouse said NASA recorded a temperature anomaly in 2013 of 0.61 degrees Celsius above the 1950 to 1981 average, supposedly making it the seventh warmest year, at least if government data is to be believed. However, he said, it is identical to 2003 and just 0.01 above 2009 and 2006. “Taking into account the errors there has been no change since last year,” the astrophysicist observed in widely quoted remarks.
NOAA’s numbers were similar to NASA’s, with a few minor variations. “Note that only 0.09 degrees C separates their top ten warmest years,” Whitehouse wrote about the government findings. “Each year has an associated error of 0.1 degree.” However, despite the tiny differences that many climate experts argue are entirely insignificant, the U.S. government functionaries — whose salaries and budgets largely depend on the perpetuation of global-warming alarmism — touted them loudly.
Deputy Director Gavin Schmidt at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, for example, said 2013 was tied with two other years to come in as the seventh warmest on record. “There are times such as today when we can have snow even in a globally warming world. But the long-term trends are very clear,” he claimed. “They’re not going to disappear. There isn’t an error in our calculations.”
Emphasizing that single short-term hot or cold spells do not debunk man-made global-warming theories — it was not immediately clear who supposedly believes that — Schmidt claimed that the long-term trends are “extremely robust.” However, he also conceded that “the trends over the last 10 to 15 years compared to the trends before do appear to be lower than they were.”
“We’ve been looking at this in separate work and partially it seems to be a function of internal variability in the system,” Schmidt was quoted as telling reporters. “So the fact is that we’ve had more La Nina-like conditions over the last few years compared to earlier on in the 2000s or in the late 1990s.” Still, Schmidt and his colleagues at NOAA insisted that the catastrophic man-made global-warming theories — supposedly requiring carbon taxes and a UN-run “carbon-budget” regime — have not yet been discredited.
Numerous independent climatologists and scientists, however, have ripped into the scaremongering coming from alarmists in recent years — especially “warmest-on-record” claims. “Global warming enthusiasts are arguing that the past decade has been the warmest on record,” explained MIT meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen, who has served on the UN IPCC but is now one of its harshest critics. “We are still speaking of tenths of a degree, and the records themselves have come into question…. For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause.”
As NASA, NOAA, and the UN were busy defending their theories in the face of an increasingly skeptical public and vast amounts of evidence suggesting that their claims are wrong, a growing number of independent experts were starting to publicly predict global cooling. Citing declining solar activity, more and more scientists now say that the Earth is entering what may prove to be a long period of declining temperatures — with potentially devastating consequences for humanity.
Indeed, some leading climate researchers say the cooling is already here, and that global temperatures could eventually sink back down to “Little Ice Age” levels last seen in the 1870s. For now, then, humanity might be wise to at least hold off on destroying the global economy and creating a planetary carbon budget in the name of fighting “global warming” — especially since the latest data confirms that it has been stopped for almost two decades.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected].
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