Calm down, climate alarmists; the weather events taking place are nothing new.
Climatologist Patrick Michaels said that recent droughts, warmer temperatures because of El Nino, and the blizzard of 2016 were “business as usual.”
Michaels, a climatologist and the director of the Center for the Study of Science at The Cato Institute, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal Jan. 24, explaining that recent droughts, blizzards, and flooding “little to do with what recent headlines have been saying about the hottest year ever.”
However, no one would know that from watching the broadcast news networks. Between 2013 and 2014, the media have increased their coverage of “extreme weather” by nearly 1,000 percent compared to the year before former Vice President Al Gore’s feature-length outcry over global warming known as An Inconvenient Truth was released. That film premiered at Sundance Film Festival ten years ago (2006).
While the liberal media and climate change activists would have the world believe that “extreme” weather events are proof of climate change, Michaels said the current weather has little to do with “climate change” and nearly everything to do with established weather patterns.
Even the claim that 2015 was the “hottest year ever” didn’t bolster the climate change alarmist arguments, according to Michaels. The temperature increase is a result of the “massive” El Nino that began in early 2015.
“El Nino years in a warm plateau usually set a global-temperature record. What happened this year also happened with the last big one, in 1998,” Michaels explained.
He said that the data shows that in 1998, the global average temperature was about a quarter of a degree higher than the previous year - just like 2015. But after the 1998 El Nino was over, the global temperature average dropped below what it had been in 1997. Michaels predicted that the same will happen once 2015’s El Nino has run its course.
Michaels noted that even with the slight warming in 2015, the overall warming trend is far less than climate models predicted. Satellite temperatures made fools of those models, when a “hiatus” in warming took place from 1997 through 2015. However, Michaels explained how one government agency modified how they measure in 2015, to erase that pause.
According to Michael’s op-ed, in 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) overhauled their temperature data and threw out their “satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures,” which they’d been recording since the 1970s.
NOAA began relying on data from the “cooling-water-intake tubes of oceangoing vessels” — a method he and others have said is less accurate because ships conduct heat, absorb large amounts of energy from the sun, and don’t have uniform intake tube depths.
“NOAA’s alteration of its measurement standard and other changes produced a result that could have been predicted: a marginally significant warming trend in the data over the past several years,” said Michaels.
Because climate change predictions were made using this inaccurate data, Michaels concluded that it is “probably prudent to cut by 50% the modeled temperature forecasts for the rest of this century. Doing so would mean that the world—without any political effort at all—won’t warm by the dreaded 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 that the United Nations regards as the climate apocalypse.”
