Climate Alarmists Warm It Up…They overcook the evidence of 2014 to support their shaky predictions of global warming.

Rupert Darwall:

The year 2014 had scarcely expired before being declared the warmest year on record. First off was the Japan Meteorological Agency. The year 2014 surpassed 1998 to set a new record by all of five one hundredths of one degree Centigrade, according to the agency’s preliminary numbers. Then Britain’s Met Office announced that 2014 was the warmest year in the 355 years of the Central England Temperature series.

Each year, global-warming adherents anticipate an El Niño (a strong warming phase in the Pacific) as the physical manifestation of global warming’s Second Coming to herald the end of the barren years of flat-lining global temperatures. The Center for American Progress’s Joe Romm called the 2014 record doubly impressive. As Romm noted, “We’re still waiting for the start of El Niño” but got a temperature record nonetheless.

After years of climate-change prognosticators’ pointing to extreme weather events — Arctic (but not Antarctic) sea-ice extent and, as they claim, excess heat disappearing into the ocean — as evidence of global warming, it is scientifically healthy that attention is focusing back on trends in global surface and atmospheric temperature, as the theory is that global warming should drive climate change. Indeed, the Met Office press release belies alarmist notions of “climate disruption,” “climate breakdown,” and the other terms trotted out from the shop-soiled lexicon of alarmism.

Despite seeing a record-breaking year overall, Britain had no major heat waves, and no new monthly records were set in 2014. Instead, each month was consistently warm, only one having below-average temperatures, and the year seeing the lowest number of frosts since 1961. Similarly with rainfall: Although 2014 was one of the 20 wettest years since 1766, no individual region had its wettest year on record. After a stormy January and February in Britain, the rest of the year was “relatively quiet,” as the Met Office describes it.

This isn’t part of the narrative being spun by Naomi Oreskes, Harvard professor of the history of science. Previewing the hottest-year-on-record announcements, Oreskes wrote in the New York Times last week that we were underreacting to the reality of dangerous climate change “now unfolding before our eyes.” The burden of proof should be lowered, Oreskes argued, but her excursion into statistical methodology to buttress this contention was widely panned (here, here, and here).

Most jaw-dropping was Oreskes’s claim that climate change is happening “faster than scientists predicted.” This is flat-out untrue. A 2013 commentary co-authored by Francis Zwiers, an elected member of the IPCC Bureau and former IPCC lead coordinating author, found that recent observed global warming was significantly less than the surface trend simulated by climate models. In the 15 years to 2012, the observed trend of 0.05 degrees Centigrade per decade — not significantly different from zero, according to the authors — was more than four times smaller than the averaged simulated trend of 20 climate models used by the IPCC. Since the turn of the century, the 15-year running trend in observed temperature has fallen back to the 1900–2012 trend, an increase of around seven tenths of one degree Centigrade per century. For Oreskes’s claim to be valid, scientists would have had to be expecting global cooling.

In science, models are used to produce predictions that can be tested against nature and thereby advance scientific knowledge. On this basis, the clear inference of the disagreement between climate-model simulations and observations over the past two decades is that scientists’ current understanding of the climate system is faulty. Climate science is not normal science: It has become the leading branch of global therapeutics. Climate-model outputs are used as a tool to win the political battle for policies believed necessary to save a dying planet.

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