How many times has all this fake evidence been used by the climate change deniers on here?
Our own online search led us to a Sept. 10, 2013, commentary by Forbes magazine staff writer Alex Knapp taking Rose to task for focusing too closely on short-term temperature changes.
On the suggestion that global warming paused in 1997, Knapp wrote: "Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ‘All of the top ten warmest years in the record have occurred since the last major El Niño event, in 1998.’ What’s more, according to NOAA, ‘Since 1976, every year including 2012 has had an annual temperature above the long-term average.’ In fact the two warmest years on record are 2005 and 2010, and the years between 2000 and 2010 had higher average temperatures than the years between 1990 and 1999.
"To show the continued rise of global average temperatures over the decades, this chart from the World Meteorological Organization helps to make it pretty clear:
"These rising temperatures have serious consequences. Rising temperatures melt glaciers on land, including Greenland and Antarctica. As those melts make their way to the oceans, they cause sea levels to rise. And those rising sea levels are real and have been measured. Here’s a chart of sea level rise since the 1880s – you can see the steadily rising trend for yourself.
"The bottom line is that, as I wrote last summer, ‘In the end, everything about climate science boils down to one simple fact: all else being equal, increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in a mixture of gasses will cause the mixture to absorb more heat.’"
Knapp closed: "For our planet, that means as more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, the warmer the planet will get. Sure, there might be some short term anomalies – one year might be cooler than its preceding year, for instance – but the long term trend remains…"
Texas and U.S. climatologists
Broadly, the Texas climatologists we reached said Smitherman got it wrong.
"The Earth is warming," Nielsen-Gammon said.
By email, Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, called Smitherman’s claim incorrect, adding: "First, climate is defined as the average over 20-30 years or more precisely because atmospheric scientists know that short-term natural cycles in the rates at which heat is exchanged between the ocean and atmosphere can lead to variations in global air temperature over shorter time scales."
Hayhoe and Tobis each cautioned that cherry-picking start and stop years can lead to factually skewed conclusions about temperature trends."If you cherry-pick short periods of time, you can end up with nearly any result you want," Hayhoe said. "Only by looking at the entire dataset can you see what the truth is."
Hayhoe noted, too, that a study accepted for online posting by the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Metereological Society on Nov. 12, 2013, shortly before Smitherman wrote his email, indicates that global temperatures have been underestimated since 1997 because they did not correctly reflect Arctic warming.
Hayhoe further said the proper measure of warming extends past ocean or air temperatures alone. She pointed us to a chart posted on the Skeptical Science website, which focuses on touting peer-reviewed science related to climate change and debunking arguments built on incomplete information. The chart indicates that based on data published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres in September 2009, the ocean and earth have been warming for the past 50 years.
Curiously, the state commission chaired by Smitherman, which regulates oil and gas exploration, has a section of its website detailing scientific concerns about greenhouse gases and global warming.
A source note on that site led us to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a federal effort launched by Congress in 1990 to coordinate and integrate global change research across 13 government agencies. We then downloaded a draft "climate assessment" report from the program, dated Jan. 11, 2013, including a letter to the American people stating: "Long-term, independent records from weather stations, satellites, ocean buoys, tide gauges, and many other data sources all confirm the fact that our nation, like the rest of the world, is warming, precipitation patterns are changing, sea level is rising, and some types of extreme weather events are increasing," the draft said.
Another part of the draft, prepared by the 60-member National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee, said: "Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans. This evidence has been compiled by scientists and engineers from around the world, using satellites, weather balloons, thermometers, buoys, and other observing systems. The sum total of this evidence tells an unambiguous story: the planet is warming. U.S. average temperature has increased by about 1.5°F since 1895; more than 80% of this increase has occurred since 1980. The most recent decade was the nation’s hottest on record."
Previous fact checks
From another vantag point, recent fact checks do not support Smitherman’s statement.
PolitiFact New Jersey in July 2013 rated as True a claim that every "single month since 1985 has been warmer than the historic average" and that all "12 of the warmest years on record have come in the last 15 years." Those statistics were backed up by data released by NOAA scientists and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. As for the warmest years on record, NOAA scientists estimate that the last 15 years have included the 14 hottest years and NASA scientists have said that same time period included the 13 hottest years.
A month later, though, PolitiFact Rhode Island rated as Half True a claim that global surface temperatures have been flat for 16 years. This held up partly due to the cherry-picked and short timeframe, which swept in 1998, the El Niño year that made surface temperatures exceptionally warm. When you start near an unusually hot year, there's a good chance that subsequent years will be cooler.
That fact check considered major climate databases including one from NASA and another from the Hadley Centre of the Met Office, which is the United Kingdom's National Weather Service. It also tapped a tool available at SkepticalScience.com, whose Temperature Trend Calculator page allows users to pick from among several sets of temperature data and pick various timeframes.
Hadley showed a .170 degree increase over those 16 years and NASA's numbers showed a .251 rise. Neither increase exceeded what could have happened by chance.
Upshot: The global temperatures that were rising so rapidly in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s appeared to have stalled. In fact, the Met Office had begun referring to the latest 16 years as "the recent pause in warming." Officials there had issued three reports to try to explain the plateau. They stressed that the last decade was still the warmest on record and asserted that temperatures will likely resume their rapid rise soon, although the agency is not offering a timetable.
Said physicist Robert Brecha, of the University of Dayton: "There is increasing evidence in the peer-reviewed literature that over the past decade or so more thermal energy is going into the deep ocean, rather than into the atmosphere. This is almost certainly just a temporary, cyclical process. The key point is that additional greenhouse gases trap heat in the earth system, keeping that energy from flowing back out to space," Brecha said. "So if the atmosphere doesn't receive that heat [thereby increasing its temperature] that trapped energy is nevertheless building up."
For our part, we rated as Pants on Fire a legislator’s April 2013 claim that science has not shown greenhouse gases to be a problem. To the contrary, scientists have agreed for years that such gases contribute to atmospheric changes driving climatic warming.
Naomi Oreskes, then a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, sent us a chapter of a pending book updating her 2004 look into scientific consensus about climate change. A portion of the chapter said: "Scientists predicted a long time ago that increasing greenhouse gas emissions could change the climate, and now there is overwhelming evidence that it is changing the climate." However, "to say that man-made global warming is underway is not the same as agreeing about what will happen in the future. Much of the continuing debate in the scientific community involves the likely rate of future change."
"There are climate scientists who actively do research in the field but disagree with the consensus position," the chapter later says, "but their number is very, very small."
We also contacted Oreskes for this article. She passed our inquiry to Richard Somerville, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who emailed us calling Smitherman’s claim "nonsense." Somerville wrote: "It is just plain foolish to focus on short-term distractions in the climate record due to natural variability, while ignoring the long term-trend due to human activities."
Somerville described Smitherman’s offered articles as unscientific, adding: "They misrepresent or ignore what climate science has actually discovered(.)"
By email, Craighead of Smitherman’s campaign responded by stressing afresh the Easterbook presentation indicating a global cooling period since 1999.
Our ruling
To the contrary, national, international and Texas climate authorities concur that the planet is warming. They also warn against cherry-picking individual climatic indicators or timeframes to conclude otherwise. That makes sense to us. In the end, this claim strikes us as both unfounded and ridiculous.
Pants on Fire!
