2014 Wasn't the Warmest Year Ever

I saw the headline yesterday at the Washington Post announcing the "hottest year in recorded history" and just rolled my eyes. We know, in fact, that the earth's temperature is not rising, a fact that even the U.N.'s IPCC acknowledged in its most recent report with regard to "unexplained anomalies" in the panel's climate forecast models. But most Americans don't know the technical details in the climate change policy debates, and if journalist do, they certainly have a bias against honest reporting and public openness and skepticism, since the "climate change" agenda is the progressives' pet big-government project of decade.

So here's today's cover at the Los Angeles Times, a literal banner announcement, gleeful in its presentation, of the story on record warming, "How hot was it? 2014 was Earth's warmest year on record, data show."

The problem, quite simply, is that it's just not true.

IBD has an editorial concisely debunking the lies, "Is 2014 The Hottest Year Ever? Satellites Say No":

The news is ablaze with a report that 2014 was the "hottest year." But there's no reason to be excited. The story the global warming alarmists are trying to tell isn't the only one out there.

'For the third time in a decade," shouted the AP, "the globe sizzled to the hottest year on record, federal scientists announced Friday."

The Washington Post reported that "the year 2014 was the hottest ever measured, based on records going back to the year 1880."

Bloomberg News challenged readers to "deny this" and directed them to "animation below" that documents "2014: The Hottest Year."

Hysteria also reigned at the BBC in Britain, the New Era in Africa, Australia's Sydney Morning Herald and all points in between.

In one sense, the breathless stories are correct: 2014 was the hottest year on record — by no more than four-hundredths of a degree. But that's based on surface thermometer records, which are not reliable.

Better measurement is done by satellites, and they indicate 2014 was the third-warmest in the 36 years that satellites have been used to document temperatures.

John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says the satellite data show that temperature changes since 2001 are "statistically insignificant."

As expected, though, some scientists — a few of whom are considered "distinguished" — take the hottest-ever report as confirmation that man is dangerously warming his planet due to fossil-fuel use.

But a few have kept their heads. Roger Pielke, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, told the Post that "there remain significant uncertainties in the accuracy of the land portion of the surface temperature data, where we have found a significant warm bias."

Judith Curry, professor at Georgia Tech's school of earth and atmospheric sciences, said that "with 2014 essentially tied with 2005 and 2010 for hottest year," the implication is "that there has been essentially no trend in warming over the past decade."

"This 'almost' record year does not help the growing discrepancy between the climate model projections and the surface temperature observations," she added.

There's simply nothing to see here. But that's the way it's always been with the global-warming swindle.

Oh, and for the record, here's the Telegraph's report from 2013 on the problems at the IPCC, "Scientists working on a landmark UN report on climate change to be published this week are at loggerheads over their explanation for why the earth’s surface temperature has stopped rising as rapidly as they previously predicted."

Yep, it's certainly a swindle. Sadly, though, millions of Americans are getting bilked.