As expected, deniers are all furiously attempting to discredit the news that 2014 was the hottest year on record. While the day-of and day-after coverage was a little more varied in its approach, this week, deniers seem to be coalescing on a single line of attack: the statistical margin of error and NASA's uncertainty.
Taking the Daily Mail piece as their cornerstone (which, for those unaware of the Daily Mail's reputation, is like citing The National Enquirer), bloggers and pundits are hyping up the hottest year "hoax." The Federalist calls it, "The Most Dishonest Year on Record," while Morano went on Fox News claiming, "It's statistical nonsense," and that people promoting the hottest year are, "talking about statistically meaningless temperature records," that are, "way within the margin of error."
However, as reported in Mashable, deniers are "twisting the meaning of uncertainty ranges and making it seem like there is far less confidence in temperature data than there actually is." Well-known uncertainties in the global temperature data make it difficult to calculate the exact likelihood that a given year is the warmest on record. But, among the three hottest years on record—2014, 2010 and 2005—there is the greatest amount of certainty (38 percent) that 2014 was the hottest on record. What's more, if you compare years, the chances that 2014 was warmer than 2010 is about 60 percent, according to NASA's director, Gavin Schmidt.
Of course, to anyone who refuses to believe that NOAA, NASA, JMA and all the independent climate scientists the world over are engaged in a vast international conspiracy, headlines like "'Hottest year' hysteria a ploy to make us poorer" will be met with disbelief and derision.
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