Last week, NASA published a pair of studies concerning the validity and reliability of global temperature observations. The announcement garnered little attention, which makes sense. The data in the studies weren’t exactly new findings, but rather confirmation of widely-accepted science: the global temperature network is accurate, lines up well with the satellite record, and reassures us that 2016 was the warmest year on record.
Though this sounds fairly technical and in the weeds, as NASA GISS head Gavin Schmidt tweeted, “This is a big deal actually.” The studies prove that we’ve been warming, and that recent years are undoubtedly the warmest. For years deniers have contested the official observational temperature records, and if they were the sort to operate in good faith, these studies would be quite the condemnation.
In 2015, NASA announced 2014 was the hottest year on record, but with a disclaimer that the margin of error between 2010 and 2014 meant they were only 38% certain of the finding. David Rose at the Daily Mail, ever hungry for fake news, ran with the mischaracterization, feeding the denial machine a tasty talking point hyping uncertainty. The significance of the 38% figure was debunked at the time, but obviously being proven wrong has never stopped deniers before, and didn’t then.
Looking back now, though, Schmidt explained NASA was “conservative” in its estimate, and “now rank 2014 at 79% likely to have been the warmest at the time.” But then, of course, 2015 was even warmer, and 2016 even warmer than that. The first of the two new studies concludes that there is a “86% likelihood that 2016 was indeed the hottest year of the instrumental period (so far).”
“Well actually,” deniers are apt to reply, aren’t our observations biased, and satellites the only real way to measure global temperatures to determine if we’ve been warming? Enter the second study, where Schmidt and co-authors compared the thermometer record with measurements made from the EOS Aqua satellite.
The satellite record and the ground-based observations use two entirely different approaches to measuring global temperature, so for deniers who believe that scientists have tampered with the ground network, satellites offer an independent way to test the record’s validity. Unsurprisingly, the new study shows that the official NASA GISS temperature record of thermometers on the ground and the satellite record “are highly coherent,” which is jargon for “yep, looks the same.”
And again, unsurprisingly, the study confirms that 2016 “was the warmest year yet.”
In honor, then, of finding out things we already knew, we’ll point back to one of our favorite pieces. Back in December of 2014, the World Meteorological Organization warned that the year was looking to be the hottest on record. In response, denier Willie Soon said that such proclamations were “prostituting science.”
Two short months later, the New York Times reported on the millions of dollars the fossil fuel industry paid Willie Soon to produce his denial science deliverables, providing one of the most pure and illustrative examples of how deniers project their moral/ethical/scientific shortcomings onto others.
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