Just Kidding

The other day we heard that NASA and NOAA both claimed that 2014 was the hottest year on record, the implication being that global temperatures are rising and we better get serious about stemming the production of greenhouse gases and the use of fossil fuels.

We also heard from the skeptics who pointed out that even if it's true that 2014 was hotter than the next two hot years (2005, 2010) it was by a mere few hundredths of a degree which is insignificant and that what the data really shows is that global temperatures continue their nearly two decade-long plateau.

Now comes word that, in effect, NASA was just kidding. They don't know if 2014 was a record-breaker or not. Here's the report from the Daily Mail:

The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.

In a press release on Friday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’.

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.

Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much.

As a result, GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond.

In other words, it's much more likely that their original claim was wrong than that it was right. Is it any wonder that so many people doubt these people when they tell us we're headed for eco-catastrophe. Until climatologists can make predictions which come to pass and until they stop trying to scare the bejabbers out of us on the basis of a 38% probability and non-existent "hockey stick" temperature increases, the reasonable course is to take their pronouncements with a healthy dose of skepticism.