USA Today is the latest ‘fact checker’ trying to cast doubt on our claim in a recent article that data from weather balloons, along with the satellite record, show the rate of global warming has slowed over the last 20 years. The newspaper’s main source for saying our contention was “false” is a climate researcher who claims the rate of warming in this period is “much faster” than between 1980-2000. The researcher, Zeke Hausfather from Berkeley Earth, is at the forefront of alarmist climate claims. In 2020, he published a paper with NASA’s Senior Climate Adviser Gavin Schmidt, claiming that climate models published over the last five decades “were generally quite accurate in predicting global warming”.
As I shall shortly show, USA Today‘s fact-checking of climate stories calls to mind Dr. Johnson’s dog walking on hind legs – it is not done well, but you are surprised to see it done at all.
This is the second time that our article on the data supplied by the meteorology balloons has been ‘fact checked’. The first appeared in Climate Feedback and featured remarks from Gavin Schmidt. Regular readers might find the next couple of paragraphs familiar and prefer to skip them.
My article was published on May 19th under the heading: “New evidence shows global warming has slowed dramatically over last 20 years.” I reported that in a major re-evaluation of 40 years of telemetric data from meteorology balloons rising through the troposphere, scientists confirmed that temperatures had mostly paused since around 1998. I linked to the original research, and published the following graphs, so that readers could take a view on my statement.
The graphs show the results for the northern hemisphere up to 70°N and the tropics. Most of the warming over the last 40 years occurred up to the late 1990s. The tropics, it was noted, had warmed less than the north, and in fact at 11 km it is difficult to discern any significant warming at all. I also reported that temperature pauses from 1998-2010, and a current one lasting 91 months, had been largely wiped from all major surface temperature datasets. Over the last decade, the U.K. Met Office has added 30% heating to recent figures in its HadCRUT record and depressed earlier measurements.
Welcome back to the regulars. My suggestion that a great deal of the global warming over the last 40 years ago happened up to around the late 1990s is based on the evidence of our own eyes. Much of the warming has occurred in the northern hemisphere. I published the graphs and readers can look and make up their own minds. When Zeke Hausfather tells USA Today that the Earth warmed 56% faster in the last 20 years than in the prior two decades, he is referring to all the adjusted surface temperature datasets such NOAA.
All that human-adjusted database warming does not seem to be replicated in the satellite record.
Regular readers will also recall we published the above graph to show the increasingly haywire paths taken by climate model predictions over the last two decades, as they diverge from the thick green line showing the satellite temperature record. If one takes the temperature high point in the late 1990s, it is difficult to understand – again using our eyes – how USA Today can judge our story false by saying the ”rate of global warming has actually increased since the late 1990s”. But then it is also difficult to understand how Hausfather and Schmidt can call climate models “quite accurate” and go on to suggest their research should “resolve” public confidence around past performance.
Readers seeking detailed critical appraisal of the Hausfather/Schmidt paper can read Christopher Monkton’s work here. Monkton looked in detail at the findings and concluded that the paper plainly demonstrated precisely the opposite, “that models have exaggerated global warming – and continue to do so”.
Anyway, enough of all this green blob fact checking nonsense. Let’s conclude by looking at some of the high standards of climate science reporting that we might expect to find in USA Today. In June 2020, the newspaper reported that the South Pole had warmed at over three times the global rate for the past 30 years. A paper written by Kyle Clem from Victoria University of Wellington analysed weather stations and climate model data and concluded that the South Pole had warmed by nearly 2°C between 1989 and 2018. USA Today reported that the warming has been “intensified by human-caused climate change”.
Alas, the warming does not seem to have shown up in the accurate satellite record, where there has been no warming seen at the South Pole since 1978 and probably long before. Alas, again, a check of Google failed to find any report from the newspaper highlighting that the last six-month winter at the South Pole was the coldest recorded since records began in 1957. Of course, the newspaper was in good company – the BBC also thought the matter unworthy of wider public dissemination.
There was space, however, in March this year for the suggestion that a heatwave had hit large areas of Antarctica and it was “70 degrees warmer than average”. The story was ubiquitous across mainstream media and was often accompanied by a diagram said to show the heatwave. Clicking on a caption revealed the information that the extra heating was mostly based on a computer model called Global Forecast System. Data from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station during the same period found no evidence of a heatwave from March 17th-22nd, bar a small rise to –56°F on the morning of March 18th. A few days later, the model simulated heatwave had gone.
In December 2021, USA Today claimed that “unusual warmth” had a big impact on a spate of tornadoes that struck five American States. “The latest science indicates that we can expect more of these huge (tornado) outbreaks because of human-caused climate change,” claimed Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann. Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, told the Guardian that climate change was “making some of the ingredients needed to create an outbreak like this more likely”. The USA Today Network is said to have examined years of tornado data “to determine that millions of Americans living in the South are now at an even greater risk for tornadoes than those in the Plains”.
EF3-5 are the most severe tornadoes, and in reality, far from increasing in number ‘due to climate change’, they are actually decreasing.
But again, this is mere eyesight evidence.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
They’re getting angry, very angry!
It is a good sign if you are taking flak. Mr Internet says USA today is owned by Gannet, which is owned by New Media Investment, which is owned by Wes Edens’ New Fortress Investment Group. The owner of the Milwaukee Bucks and a major donor to the Democratic National Convention. So.
Marvellous.
Excellent publicity. Keep it up DS.
The USA Today article never brings itself to mention the DS by name, instead referring to it repeatedly as “a blog”
Then at the end it goes on to provide a long list of sources that supposedly back up their so called fact check.
Their implication is clear. A random “blogger” says A and all these “scientists” say B. Who are you going to believe.
And that is basically their entire “fact check”. There is no engagement with the arguments or the facts. There is no actual fact checking.
And that sums up the state of the world. What you hear very loudly and often is the “truth” and what you hear faintly and occasionally is “fake news” and “misinformation”.
These people know what they are doing. They know they have to bludgeon the actual truth to death before it spreads and gets out of control.
The online harms bill will help with that.
Many thanks for yet another excellent article that is clear and well sourced scientifically but also accessible to the intelligent layperson.
No wonder they don’t like what you’re doing!
I agree, the author is always excellent value for us who like stats but one has to ask why these charlatans continue to argue the facts. Is it cognitive dissonance or is it that there is one helluva lot of monies to gained in the pseudo climate change business? Take your pick!
If it is the first, then we have a very long way to go, if it is the second , then we may gradually win out.
Over the target and therefore a danger.
I’d be very careful if I worked at ‘USA Today’. I’ve heard they had to take down 23 articles of ‘fake news’ from their website the other day. I don’t think they are in a position to ‘Fact Check’ anyone.
Here: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-fact-checker-usa-today-forced-delete-articles-over-fabricated-sources
Hi Chris,
Appreciate you articles on this topic. Very informative.
I would very much like to understand, mathematically how climate temperatures are collated in order to see any changes upwards or down.
Every temperature measurement location will experience daily changes of temperature from night to day and also across the seasons. How is this translated into a single measurement and how is it justified that specific trend either up or down is there from these variations. Ie I got up today and the sun was making the back garden hot, is this temperature demonstrating a rise or a fall from previous measurements?
Additionally, if we start adding measurement locations, how can these be integerated without adding weighting bias.
Sorry for the semi technical question but the whole measurement process seems a bit vague.
I think if this is better understood people would see that is just another modelling fiasco.
Thanks Julian
Gannett, which owns USA Today, just merged with another newspaper chain. All of these papers I think are in their death throes.
The Montgomery Advertiser – 50 minutes from my town – is a Gannett paper. A typical issue used to be 48 pages. It’s now maybe 18 pages. Half the people in my town used to subscribe to the paper. Today, I know nobody that does. They do not throw newspapers in driveways anymore. There used to be a newspaper rack at every convenience store in town. Today, I think there is one or two racks in my town.
And the size of the pages have shrunk dramatically. There is hardly any “news” in a Gannett newspaper. A paper that used to have 30 full-time reporters might have five now.
There are hardly any advertisements in the paper. I really don’t know how they all stay open. Someone must be subsiding them.
Good work Mr. Morrison, it shows that they are afraid of you and that you have them on the run.