Pirate's Cove

How warm was 2013? Well, Warmist Bryan Walsh wants you to know that despite all that snow and cold and stuff, we’re like doomed

(Time) But don’t worry—on a global climatic scale, the heat is still on. That’s the takeaway from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) annual analysis of global climate data, which was released Tuesday. The red-hot numbers:

• 2013 ties with 2003 as the fourth-warmest year globally since records began in 1880.
• The annual global combined land and ocean surface temperatures was 58.12 degrees Fahrenheit (14.52 degrees Celsius), 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average (the warmest year on record is 2010, which was 1.19 degrees Fahrenheit (0.66 Celsius) above the average.
• 2013 was the 37th consecutive year that the annual global temperature was above the average, which means that if you were born any year after 1976, you’ve never experienced a year when the global climate was average, let along cooler.
• Including 2013, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred in the 21st century, and just one year in the 20th century—1998—was warmer than 2013.

The NOAA report, coming out in the middle of a major snowstorm and during a U.S. winter that’s been marked by the polar vortex, is a reminder that climate isn’t about the day-to-day changes in the weather (Note: NASA came out with its own report on 2013, using a different calculating method than NOAA, and found 2013 to be slightly cooler, but still the seventh-warmest year on record). It’s about the very long-term, as Gavin Schmidt, the deputy director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon:

There you go: day to day changes (you know, like a 17 year pause, 4 out of the past 5 winters being brutal, and this one looks like it might follow that pattern) are meaningless. Except when they back up the Warmist’s memes, then they have meaning.

Anyhow, you know what is missing from the entire article? Proof that the warming is anthropogenic.

And 2014, despite the snowy and chilly start in the U.S., could be even hotter. Scientists now say that an El Nino seems likely to develop later this year, which is likely to push temperatures up in 2014 and 2015, since El Nino years tend to be warmer. So enjoy the snow while you can—it will likely be a faint memory by time Americans are sweating in July.

El Nino is a natural pattern, so, this would mean that if 2014 ends up being a warm one, then it is natural.

Notice that Bryan hedges his bet about 2013 being the 4th warmest by briefly mentioning that NASA has it as the 4th globally. The Hockey Schtick notes

Surprisingly, official government temperature records disagree on how much global warming there was in 2013 in comparison other years that are statistically-insignificant-meaningless-hundredths-of-a-degree different.

One thing is for sure, the globe has fortunately recovered from the Little Ice Age, which coincidentally ended in ~1850 at the start of the instrumental global temperature record, and which shows after UHI-artificial-warming and up-tampered data the temperature rise could have been as much as a whopping 0.7C since 1850. Not only that, the world’s oceans have warmed 0.09C over the past 55 years alone!

• NOAA Says 2013 Was The Fourth Warmest Year
• NASA Says 2013 Was Seventh Warmest Year
• RSS AMSU 2013: 10th warmest year on record
• CET: 2013 was 107th warmest year on record [longest instrumental temperature record]
• HADCRU [unofficial analysis]: 2013 8th warmest year on record
• Report: Fed scientists accused of ‘unjustifiably adding on a whopping one degree of phantom warming to the official ‘raw’ temperature record’

So, um, which was it? How can we trust the data when the conclusions are different? How can the models possibly be correct (the vast majority aren’t, BTW) when the data is all over the place?

Again, none of the hyperventilating about tiny changes in temperature prove anthropogenic causation.