March 04, 2016

Total and utter crooks

Pesky CO2

Despite its utter triviality, the 2015 temperature rise produced by NOAA of 13 hundredths of one degree has been hailed with gladsome hearts by Warmists. Their enthusiasm has however been tempered by the well-known fact that 2015 hosted an El Nino event, a natural climate oscillation that is known to produce a rise in termperatures.  So it is perfectly clear that the 2015 temperature is no proof of anthropogenic warming.  Warmists don't like having their toys taken off them, however, so Jim Hansen and others have dismissed the El Nino contribution as slight.

So how great or small was it?  They do not say.  They offer no calibration or adjustment.  The adjustment kings don't do that adjustment! Yet an adjustment as good as any other they use would be to take the spike observed for the previous El Nino and simply subtract it from the 2015 temperature.  Not hard!

But something that needs no inferences at all is the CO2 record. If the temperature rise was anthropogenic, global warming theory tells us that CO2 was responsible.  It tells us that the temperature spike should have been preceded by a spike in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.  So did that happen?  Was there an unusual rise in CO2 levels during 2015?

For information about CO2 levels I like to turn to the Cape Grim figures, as it is much better located than Mauna Loa, which is near an active volcano.  So I first looked to Cape Grim, in Northern Tasmania.  And the last 4 months they had up showed exactly the opposite of the Warmist story. The levels were drastically plateaued.  They showed variations only in the decimal points of CO2 ppm.

I was rather pleased with that finding but I was vexed that CSIRO had still not put up the figures from December 2015 or January 2016.  February 2016 would have been nice too but I could cut them some slack on that one.  And WHY were they so behind with their posting?  Were the more recent figures even more devastating?

So I turned to Mauna Loa.  And my first look at the Mauna Loa site was an instant laugh.  They showed that the difference between January 2015 and January 2016 was only 2.56 ppm.  But I still wanted the monthly data and I was pleased to see that they do have the whole of 2015 plus January 2016 up.

And the picture was crystal clear. The 2015 figures as a whole just oscillated.  It was up and down around the 400ppm mark for the whole of the year.  Threre was nothing to explain the 2015 temperature change. It's only the January 2016 figure that edged up a bit.

So even that headline figure that gave me an immediate laugh did not represent 2015.  They got a CO2 rise only by courtesy of January 2016.  They must be steaming with frustration.  I always go back as far as I can into the source data when I think something is fishy and did I find stinking fish this time!

How steaming were they? The following footnote on their site probably covers it:  "The last year of data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. The Mauna Loa data are being obtained at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics, and may not be the same as the globally averaged CO2 concentration at the surface".  They don't like their own data.

So the 2015 temperature rise was WHOLLY due to El Nino or some other natural effect.  What a come-down!  Once again we see the Green/Left need lies and deceptions to support their narratives.






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