How Did They “Prove” Global Warming Is “Real” This Time?

In a heavy and ham handed effort to make the facts fit the theory, scientists at the taxpayer- funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have found a way to “explain” why there has been a 15-year “pause” in global warming: Temperature readings needed to be “adjusted” to give warming temperatures context over a greater period of time.

The new climate data by NOAA scientists first doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting previous temperatures downward and then inflating recent temperature readings in more recent years – in effect, resetting the timeframe for heating and cooling periods to make it seem as if “warming is a natural part of a cooling trend”.

“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,’” wrote NOAA scientists in their study presenting newly adjusted climate data.

This is NOAA’s version of “cooking the books”.

To increase the rate in warming, NOAA scientists put more weight on certain ocean buoy arrays, adjusted ship-based temperature readings upward, and slightly raised land-based temperatures as well. Scientists said adjusted ship-based temperature data:

“…had the largest impact on trends for the 2000-2014 time period, accounting for 0.030°C of the 0.064°C trend difference.” They added that the “buoy offset correction contributed 0.014°C… to the difference, and the additional weight given to the buoys because of their greater accuracy contributed 0.012°C.”

Writing for The Daily Caller, Michael Bastasch says that for the years of 1998 and 2012
NOAA’s “new analysis exhibits more than twice as much warming as the old analysis at the global scale,” at 0.086 degrees Celsius per decade compared to 0.039 degrees per decade.

“This is clearly attributable to the new [Sea Surface Temperature] analysis, which itself has much higher trends,” scientists noted in their study. “In contrast, trends in the new [land surface temperature] analysis are only slightly higher.”

Global surface temperature data had shown a lack of statistically significant warming over the last 15 years, which baffled climate scientists, any effort to explain the hiatus in warming is rendered unnecessary by NOAA’s new “study”.

The new numbers seen in a different light allows NOAA to claim that the overall warming trend beginning with the year 1880 shows that the warming trend has not been significantly changed.

“Our new analysis now shows the trend over the period 1950-1999, a time widely agreed as having significant anthropogenic global warming, is 0.113 [degrees Celsius per decade], which is virtually indistinguishable with the trend over the period 2000-2014″ of 0.116 degrees per decade, according to the study.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “statement of two years ago – that the global surface temperature has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years’ — is no longer valid…” the study claims.

Scientists Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger with the Cato Institute say the adjustments made by NOAA were “guaranteed to put a warming trend in recent data.”

Cato scientists also argued that NOAA’s new data is an outlier compared to other global temperature records, which overwhelmingly show a hiatus in warming. The three scientists write:

“Adjusting good data upwards to match bad data seems questionable, and the fact that the buoy network becomes increasingly dense in the last two decades means that this adjustment must put a warming trend in the data…”

Bastasch further writes that:

“scientists and climate experts skeptical of man-made global warming have become increasingly critical of temperature adjustments made by government climate agencies like NASA and NOAA. Skeptics charge that agencies like NOAA have been tampering with past temperatures to make the warming trend look much more severe than is shown in the raw data.”

This all boils down to one thing. The United States should make sure a problem exists before developing and implementing solutions for it.

Morgan is a freelance writer for a variety of publications covering popular culture, societal behavior and the political influences of each.