From John Ray's shorter notes
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January 21, 2018
Experts say 2017 hottest year
Ya gotta laugh! During the temperature rise of 2015/2016, Warmists sedulously ignored the influence of El Nino. They pretended that the rise was due to CO2 -- anthropogenic global warming. Now that temperatures are allegedly sinking back, the fall is all due to El Nino. To Warmists, having your cake and eating it too is a cinch! Let them eat cake!
So now they agree with what skeptics said from early 2015 onwards and completely wipe off the recent warming period as irrelevant to their anthropogenic global warming story -- and say that 2017 is still warm even AFTER El Nino has gone. But wait a minute! How do we define the El Nino period except via temperature? According to their own GISS data, temperatures (J-D) broke upward in 2014 and have stayed high ever since. So who decided that 2017 was not influenced by El Nino -- which is the whole point of the article below? Nobody knows. What we see below is the product of shifty definitions, nothing else.
In theory, you could detect El Nino by a detailed examination of sea levels but as we see here measuring sea levels is a mug's game. By choosing different reference points you can get widely different results. The earth is not a bowl and water does not lie flat on it. And I won't mention the matter of hokey "corrections" for isostatic balance.
So what appears to have actually happened is that 2014-2017 temperatures have suddenly broken upwards to a new plateau, which is a common natural occurrence in the temperature record.
So say we concede all that they tell us with their array of numbers below. Say that we really have moved to hotter average temperature levels after the temperature stasis of the first 13 years of the century. What caused that rise? Was it CO2? They offer no proof of that. It is all "Experts say". Experts say a lot of things that are often wrong. And Warmists have yet to make an accurate prediction. So relying on such "experts" is very cold comfort indeed. We could just be dealing with some of the many natural phenomena that we don't understand.
And what is the evidence for what "Experts say"? In the large and colorful article excerpted below I strangely can find not a single statistic for CO2, the supposed cause of global warming. Why? Are the 21st century temperature changes due to changing CO2 levels, as the experts say? Do the temperature changes correspond to CO2 changes? They do not. Philosopher David Hume insisted that the one precondition for detecting a cause was constant conjunction. But there is no constant conjunction between CO2 changes and temperature changes. So one did not cause the other.
Just for fun I have downloaded the CSV data file for monthly CO2 averages from Cape Grim. So is the temperature stasis up to 2013 matched by a plateauing of CO2 levels? Far from it. The levels show a steady rise up to the end of 2013 -- continuing to July 2016. It's only from July 2016 that the CO2 levels get "stuck" on 401 ppm. They don't resume rising until June 2017.
So what a laugh! There is NO resemblance between the CO2 and temperature records. The steady CO2 rise has now resumed and reached a new height in "cooling" August 2017, the last year for which there is data. No wonder that the Warmist journalist below sticks to "Experts say" rather than dive into that inconvenient data.
Note: My use of GISS and NOAA data does not constitute an endorsement of it. I use it because Warmists do. It amuses me to show that their own data does not support their madcap theory
Last year was the HOTTEST on record without an El Nino: New figures reveal man-made global warming has overtaken the influence of natural trends on the climate
By Daily Mail Science & Technology Reporter Tim Collins
Last year was the hottest on record without the influence of the El Nino weather phenomenon that helps push up global temperatures, a new study reports.
El Nino years happen when a change in prevailing winds cause huge areas of water to heat up in the Pacific, leading to elevated temperatures worldwide.
Including El Nino years, 2016 was warmer and 2017 was joint second warmest with 2015.
The main contributor to rising temperatures over the last 150 years is human activity, scientists have said.
This includes burning fossil fuels which puts heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
They say man-made climate change is has now overtaken the influence of natural trends on the climate.
Experts say the 2017 record temperature ‘should focus the minds of world leaders’ on ‘scale and urgency’ of the risks of climate change.
The El Nino event spanning 2015 to 2016 contributed around 0.2°C (0.36°F) to the annual average increase for 2016, which was about 1.1°C (2°F) than average temperatures measured from 1850 to 1900.
However, the main contributor to warming over the last 150 years is human influence on climate from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, experts say.
2017 remains close to 1°C (1.8°F) above pre-industrial temperatures of 1850 to 1900.
The Met Office annual average global temperature forecast for 2017 said the global mean temperature for 2017 was expected to be between 0.32°C (0.57°F) and 0.56°C (1°F) above the long-term average.
The provisional figure for 2017, based on an average of three global temperature datasets, of 0.42°C (0.75°F) above the long-term average is well within the predicted range.
The forecast, made at the end of 2016, also correctly predicted that 2017 would be one of the warmest years in the record.
Experts from the Met Office's Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were involved in the findings.
They produce the Hadcrut4 dataset, which is used to estimate global temperatures.
This found that 2017 was almost 1°C (1.8°F) warmer than pre-industrial levels, measured from 1850 to 1900, and 0.38°C (0.78°F) warmer than average temperatures measured from 1981 to 2010.
That would make it the third hottest on record, including El Nino years.
Figures from a series of different international analyses, including from the NOAA and Nasa in the US, place 2017 as either second or third warmest on record.
Last year's temperatures were outstripped only by the record heat of 2016, and in some of the analyses by 2015.
Both 2016 and 2015 saw a significant El Nino, a natural phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean that increases temperatures, on top of human-induced global warming.
Dr Colin Morice, of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: 'The global temperature figures for 2017 are in agreement with other centres around the world that 2017 is one of the three warmest years and the warmest year since 1850 without the influence of El Nino.
SOURCE
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