Closing the Books on 2013: Another Year, Another Nail in the Coffin of Disastrous Global Warming

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

A few weeks have now passed since the end of last year, giv­ing enough time for var­i­ous data-com­pil­ing (and “data-adust­ing”) agen­cies to get their num­bers in order and to release the sad fig­ures from 2013.

U.S. Annu­al Aver­age Temperature

We point­ed out, back in this post in mid-Decem­ber, that there was an out­side chance—if Decem­ber were cold enough—that the aver­age annu­al tem­per­a­ture for the U.S. in 2013 would fall below the 20th cen­tu­ry aver­age for the first time since 1996.  Well, despite how cold it seemed in Decem­ber, it turned out to not quite be cold enough to push the Jan­u­ary-Decem­ber 2013 tem­per­a­ture anom­aly into neg­a­tive ter­ri­to­ry. Fig­ure 1 below shows the U.S. tem­per­a­ture his­to­ry as com­piled by the Nation­al Cli­mat­ic Data Cen­ter from 1895 through 2013.

Please be advised that this his­to­ry has been repeat­ed­ly “revised” to either make tem­per­a­tures cold­er in the ear­li­er years or warmer at the end.  Not one “adjust­ment” has the oppo­site effect, a clear con­tra­ven­tion of log­ic and prob­a­bil­i­ty.  While the US has got­ten slight­ly warmer in recent decades, com­pared to the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, so have the data them­selves.  It’s a fact that if you just take all the thou­sands of fair­ly even­ly-spaced “offi­cial” weath­er sta­tions around the coun­try and aver­age them up since 1895, that you won’t get much of a warm­ing trend at all.   Con­se­quent­ly a major and ongo­ing fed­er­al effort has been to try and cram these num­bers into the box imposed by the the­o­ry that gives the gov­ern­ment the most power—i.e., strong glob­al warming.

What imme­di­ate­ly stands out in 2013 is how excep­tion­al the aver­age tem­per­a­ture in 2012 (the warmest year in the record) real­ly was. In fact, the recov­ery in 2013 from the lofty heights in 2012 was the largest year-over-year tem­per­a­ture decline in the com­plete 119 year record—an indi­ca­tion that 2012 was an out­lier more so than “the new normal.”

Bil­lion Dol­lar Weath­er Disasters

Each year the Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion (NOAA) puts togeth­er a list of “bil­lion dol­lar weath­er dis­as­ters.”  NOAA start­ed doing this a few years ago so as to try to paint a pic­ture that human-caused glob­al warm­ing was lead­ing to ever more weath­er-relat­ed “dis­as­ters” in the Unit­ed States. We duti­ful­ly point­ed out that NOAA just as well could com­pile a list of “bil­lion dol­lar weath­er dis­as­ters avert­ed by glob­al warm­ing,” but for some rea­son they don’t.   Maybe the same rea­son that the raw tem­per­a­ture data is con­tin­u­al­ly adjust­ed to show more warming.

Con­tin­ue arti­cle here:  http://cato.org/blog/closing-books-2013-another-year-another-nail-coffin-disastrous-global-warming