Don't be fooled by a winter blizzard this week! The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rated 2014 as the hottest year in the global temperature record and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) promptly chimed in with the same finding. But there's wiggle room for the dedicated energy shill to wiggle around in, because both organizations also give an error margin when they rate a year. Chris Mooney walks
us through it:
The figure comes from slide 5 of the PowerPoint presentation mentioned above, where NASA scientists noted that there was a 38 percent chance that 2014 was the hottest year, but only a 23 percent chance that the honor goes to the next contender, 2010, and a 17 percent chance that it goes to 2005.
The same slide shows that NOAA’s scientists were even more confident in the 2014 record, ranking it as having a 48 percent probability, compared with only an 18 percent chance for 2010 and a 13 percent chance for 2005.
A figure of 38 percent may sound modest, as if there's a worse than 50/50 chance the result is correct, but this is not a local rain forecast. There are a lot of data sets that go into the annual global temperature calculation, representing daily readings and shorter term trends recorded all over the Earth throughout an entire year. Each of those measurements has tiny error bars that affect the final tally. Expert sources explained that this is especially true of largish regions around Antarctic, and when dealing with measurements recorded some time ago in the official NASA GISS temperature record, which extends all the way back to the 1880s.
That's how real science works. NASA and NOAA, being public agencies and both staffed by some of the best scientific minds available, lean toward greater transparency and scientific rigor, the tender denials of newly declared overseers Senators Cruz and Rubio notwithstanding. And in this case, it's not just US climate scientists; Japan's Meteorological Agency announced the same result last week and others may follow suit shortly.