In an attempt to get out ahead of the joint NOAA/NASA press conference on January 20—at which time the organizations are expected to announce that 2015 was the hottest year on record—Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville has published a blog post that attempts to contradicts the anticipated announcement. You might remember Spencer from his racist comparison of the Paris climate talks to a Native American pow wow, or for referring to those who use the term “deniers” as “Nazis."
Spencer's latest piece employs the old denier tactic of using satellite temperature data instead of data from the global surface thermometer data to talk about global temperature. Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail and Daily Caller have picked up the piece. The UK tabloid’s headline states that, “2015 may NOT have been the hottest year on record after all,” while the Daily Caller says that, “2015 wasn’t even close to being the hottest year on record." According to Spencer, 2015 was only the third hottest year, behind 1998 and 2010.
As legitimate media sources start reporting on the reliable thermometer record showing 2015 as a record-hot year, we can expect deniers to push back with the satellite data. But that puts them in the uncomfortable position of admitting that, even according to this problematic data, the three hottest years have occurred since 1998, which doesn’t exactly support the position that there's been no warming.
Deniers' nonsensical reliance on the satellite record (which only goes back to 1979) ignores the history of errors with this data and the fact that satellites infer, based on complex measurements, temperatures up in the atmosphere and don’t calculate those on the ground or in the ocean. So deniers are ignoring the historical record that dates back to the 1800s, as well as the ocean—which absorbs 93% of the heat added due to global warming—and actual physical temperature measurements, in favor of repeatedly-corrected air temperature measurements.
Nevertheless, expect to see more deniers pile on to this apples-to-oranges comparison, gaining momentum as this farce awakens.
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