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.
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The left: Twitter is private it can censor who it wants.
* Musk offers to buy Twitter *
The left: we can’t have a private individual wielding so much online power.
The left only want twitter if it censors people they don’t like, basically. It’s pathetic.
Someone ironically remarked on the Interweb how next all the celebs will be deserting Twitter because it doesn’t censor enough…
One can only hope…
Neither “left” nor “right” have anything that even begins to approach a critique of the internet, the megacorporations, and advertising.
#DigitalID no doubt…
Musk might just be another in the long line of saviours to lead us off the cliff.
Musk is as establishment as you can get. Anyone who believes that he has their interests at heart is deluded.
I know I’m going to end up being disappointed, but I’m genuinely interested to see what happens when he gets control of the company.
The litmus test is going to be whether Trump is allowed back on. If he isn’t we’ll know the free speech bit was BS. If he is, it’ll be a good sign.
Not that I support or oppose Trump. It’s just the ultimate test, isn’t it.
Tomorrow’s news will probably be that Musk won’t be taking it over after all.
They will let Trump back using his full verification by digitalID.
“freespeech” will be available with your full data registered to your account. So the only question do you dare to speak freely like that?
I don’t believe he is part of the establishment. He behaves nothing like him. He seems to be a true capitalist as far as I can tell. What makes you think he’s part of the establishment?
Oh, just that Tesla only manages to exist because it takes money from those who can least afford it so rich virtue signallers can have their electric toys.
How exactly is he making money from those who can least afford it?
ZEV credits and GHG credits. He is The Subsidy Truffle Hound.
If you wish to learn more about the true character of Mr Elon Reeve Musk and the shocking history of his involvement with Tesla, I would recommend reading Montana Skeptic’s articles on SeekingAlpha.com.
Yes, Montana Skeptic (Larry Fossi) has held short positions in Tesla but this does not mean he is a bad person, nor that he is lying (many try to use his short positions to discredit him and his work).
I know Larry Fossi a little, and believe his character to be of the highest integrity. And the quality of his research and writing speaks for itself.
Elon Musk had nothing to do with those policies being enacted.
Tesla could not exist without them. Not very capitalist.
Doubt it. Mostly because Musk was running Tesla at a loss to make it more popular. And even if that were the case, Musk is not responsible for any of those policies. Furthermore, he’s not forcing anyone to buy anything.
Frankly, I would much rather have Musk making money from abusive government policies than let all that money go to the cronies which made those policies in the first place. At least Musk is doing something worthwhile with the money.
What is he doing that’s so worthwhile? Help me out, I don’t see it.
Is that not enough?
‘He is revolutionizing space travel.’
He is serving up medicocre CGI atbest, even NASA do a better job.
Would this be the same NASA, which, since it retired the Space Shuttle in July 2011, has had to pay other organisations to launch astronauts into space on its behalf? Would it be the same NASA whose first Space Launch System launch was mandated by Congress to have taken place in December 2016, which has yet to even complete a test to fill it with fuel, for a scheduled launch in June? Would this be the same Elon Musk whose Space X company is the only company to have launched payload to orbit and retrieved the first stage to use again?
He slaps his sticker on things others have already invented. The man is a fraud.
Not sure what that video has to do with me.
I believe that a very important reason why society is so divided these days is that people cannot bring themselves to accept that their opponents, or the people they don’t like, or their enemies, might actually have some good qualities. It is astonishing to me to see just how many people assume that if you recognize that, say, Musk is a really good businessman, then you must absolutely love him. Cause someone that doesn’t like Musk must be completely irrational, ignore his billions upon billions, and claim that he is a horrible businessman! You people are children, I swear.
Er not correct.
Very capitalist actually, yes his empire is largely built on govt directed & subsidised areas of the economy.
He’s identified where people are willing to hand him cash for a shiny new virtue signalling toy, a fool & his money etc.
Bit like the bank robber asked why he kept robbing banks.
Hes also managed to get Space X going with astonishing achievements & bring costs down hugely, far surpassing anything done by the Govt sector.
That’ll be similar short positions to those held by Bill Gates?
“Establishment” – that’s the Archbishop of Canterbury, the lords and ladies in waiting at Buckingham Palace, and those with whom they hang out socially, at the Times, at the BBC, in MI6, and in a select group of awfully posh merchant banks, but not Mick Jagger, right?
That “authenticate all real humans” bit sounds ominous.
I’m pretty sure my having to prove to Elon Musk that I’m a “real human” somehow isn’t going to be a good thing for me.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t use or care about Twitter. Today Twitter, tomorrow the Internet.
Whilst I feel we all have the right o anonymity on the internet, anonymous bots are the plague that’s destroying it.
Assuming Musk allows people to remain anonymous I don’t really see a problem with proving who we are. Amazon and every other retailer you have ever dealt with requires you confirm your existence.
Really? I literally have had zero problem with anonymous bots on the internet. Zilch. If they’re destroying the internet, it’s happening without my noticing it.
Tesco, corner shop… oh you mean online, Silk Road, Alphabay, vice city etc.
if you have to prove who you are, it’s not anonymous.
What’s the betting that if he buys it, the Left and the rest of Big Tech (including many current Twitter board members and higher-ups) demand twitter be blacklisted/banned/defunded, just like the other free speech rivals were after the 6th Jan ‘incident’, ironically egged on by leftists ON Twitter.
They will do what the left always do: start stamping their feet like over-grown babies!
And telling everyone that those who don’t agree with them are evil, uncaring bastards.
He’ll need to clear out the 5th column of purple-haired “allies” who will be quite literally “working” (as much as they ever do) to bring it down from within.
If they’re screeching now, just wait until the culls start.
The good thing is that so many, initially at least, self-identified as trouble-makers so his job in ID’ing them to fire them is made that much easier.
I’m readying my popcorn for the show…this is gonna be sweet!
No. What they’ll do is on day one point out all the terrorist organizations on Twitter, even though they’ve been there for ages.
A bit difficult to defund it if Musk owns it.
This is superb PR and free advertising for an activity – tweeting – most should avoid, and those hooked on it would do well to delete.
This stuff is like manically following news coverage of a drug cartel dispute to see who’ll behead the most rivals and emerge the winner. The underlying activity this enables is clearly damaging society. We should treat it with the contempt it deserves.
It’s really only a sophisticated version of any blog one can post to.
I really want to see this happen. I don’t know if Musk will really enforce freedom of speech on Twitter, or he’ll make it better, or anything like that. If all those things happen, that would be a bonus. No, I just want to see if happen because of the sheer chaos. Things have been really stagnant in the social media side of things, and a complete upheaval is a good thing.
Musk is one of the foremost proponents of the climate agenda. There will be no upheaval. All heavals will be strictly downward, although may succeed in giving the impression of a shakeup.
If one of your main concerns in life is the lack of dynamism in something as destructive as social media, perhaps your priorities are different from mine. There are literally books written about how to end your own social media use like they do with alcohol and hard drugs.
He also seems to be very pro free speech, so I don’t know about that.
And your second paragraph doesn’t make sense. What does ending social media use have to do with lack of dynamism in social media? And what does the lack of dynamism in social media have to do with the fact that the trifecta of Twitter-Facebook-YouTube has been around for ages, getting more and more radical as time goes by, and something needs to change in that regard?
Your comment was about social media stagnating. That was my response.
Social media at a high level, not tweets and posts.
The Highway Code was recently revised because it’s now considered a fact of life that you can’t expect phone-picking social media-using cretins to cross roads safely.
If Musk represents turbulence rather than stagnation, the question arises: “Will someone rid us of this turbulent Musk?”
This just in.
Is Musk’s propaganda department putting out another story today, then?
twitter won’t be a platform of free speech as many countries are either in the process of having laws on the books or have already done so limiting what can be said etc. Musk buying it must be something else as I doubt he would buy a corporation just to service the US.
BlackRock are top ten investors in Twitter and Tesla. There’s only one winner to all this “excitement”. And it’s not free speech, human freedom, or dignity.
Yes, yes; but will Trump be allowed back!!!???
How can a site where woke bell ends go to virtue signal be worth so much?
Can you imagine the row coming oit of twitter HQ?
Reeeeeeeeeeeee x 1 000 000
Offer accepted in last few moments (GB News).
Hurray!
It’s ok if they don’t like it they can “build their own Twitter”, once they’ve learned to code.
We don’t often get good news these days. This is a good news day.
There are an awful lot of people on Social Media exercising their right to free speech complaining about how this will affect their right to free speech when they actually mean they don’t want somebody else to have that same right.
Musk is an opportunistic industrialist. He is also part of the elite pushing extremist ideas such as global warming and all electric vehicles, obviously for his own benefit. I just cannot see any benefit of him owning Twitter, it will be just more of the same. These elite IT behemoth silicon Valley companies are monopolistic, have far too much power and need to be broken up.