Clinging desperately to the pause, deniers have rolled out their messaging to combat the fact that 2014 was the hottest year on record. From full-blown deniers at Climate Depot and WUWT to skeptics like Curry, the new message appears to be that even if 2014 was hot, it still wasn't as hot as the models (which were, of course, tweaked for their purposes) predicted, and besides, the satellites disagree with NOAA and NASA. Others, like the Daily Mailfocused on parsing statistical margins of error.
Now a savvy climate watcher will point out that models aren't meant to predict anything; rather, they provide projections of what could be over a long time period. What's more, averaged model runs are misleading because they combine the worst-case, most-likely, and least-likely scenarios all together as though they're the same.
The satellite record is similarly limited in what it can tell us. Satellites only capture atmospheric temperature way above the ground and could well be capturing some of the mixing between upper and lower atmospheric layers, which would make it cooler than actual surface temperatures. Plus they don't measure the oceans, which absorb 90% of the heat. Oh, and the UAH satellite record is kept by Spencer and Christy, who have had to revise the satellite record upwards over and over again as other scientists point out errors, so they're probably not the most reliable source, considering it's their (chronically wrong) word against the scientists at NASA and NOAA.
There's a 1 in 27 million chance that the heat was due to natural causes. So as one tweet points out: "#ScienceDenial relies on worse odds than #powerball: 1/27,000,000 chance 2014 record heat natural."
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