Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger write at Cato.org:
Global warming beater Justin Gillis of the New York Times had an article yesterday describing a new paper in the current issue of Nature magazine, the point of which seems to be scaring people with alarming global warming statistics.
Gillis’ article “By 2047, Coldest Years May Be Warmer Than Hottest in Past,” describes the results of a class-project-cum-Nature-article headed by Camille Mora from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (please, no puns). The class assignment was to identify the year for each spot on the globe in which all future years were, according to climate model projections, warmer as a result of greenhouse gas emissions than the warmest year simulated by the models during the historical period 1860 to 2005. Mora and students termed this pivotal year the “climate departure”…
Here are some not-so-scary facts, that by others would be passed off as horrors:
● The average temperature in Central Park for the past 83 years (since 1930) (54.8°F) is greater than the warmest year during the first 39 years of the record (1869-1907) (54.7°F).
● There has only been one year in the last 20 years of the record that was colder (by just 0.2°F) than the warmest year during the first twenty years of record.
So essentially, New York City has already reached its “climate departure” date and no one noticed.
It would have been nice if the professor mentioned to his students that in 1850, the world was just coming out of the Little Ice Age. Maybe get real radical and tell them about the last great ice age, that ended only around 10,000 years ago. I’ll bet most of these students never heard of either.
Once true historic climate data is reviewed, the warming over the last 150+ years is both minimal and understandable.