All aboard the Green Gravy Train.................

‘2014 the hottest year on record’, fanfared the recent headlines. They say that it was the hottest year since records began in 1880. The Daily Mail said it was definite proof that the earth was warming ‘very quickly’. The BBC went one better, saying that 18^th Century data shows that it was the hottest year in about the last 250. And another press report said that nine of the hottest years have occurred in the last 10, which is probably true if you only start in 2004. Never mind that the report was about world climate change in which Britain is an insignificant player.

 

And the short riposte to this is in the spherical plural.

 

The snag with this claim is that global temperatures  can only be measured by satellite. Not too many of those around in Victoria’s days. And satellite records show that there has been no warming for the past 18 years. Scientists can take a much-longer term view by studying ice core records, and these show that earth’s temperature is ranked in the lowest 3% since the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. We know from historical records that Europe was much warmer in the Middle Ages (when wine was produced in Yorkshire, of all places) and in  Roman times.

 

And we have been emerging from a mini-Ice Age for the last 150 years, so it is blindingly obvious that temperatures were on average lower at the start of the period than at the end

 

According to NASA the hottest year on record for the USA was 1934. Even this is questionable because global temperature changes are measured  in hundredths of degrees, and there is no thermometer, which was the only instrument available until very recent times,  able to produce information remotely capable of this. The warmists say that this is ‘insubstantial’ because the US only occupies 2% of the earth’s land mass - and at the same time prophesying doom because of melting icecaps when the Arctic only covers 3% of the world’s land mass. The changes are measured in two-hundredths of a degree; that’s right – 2/100!

 

All this ’warmist’ stuff is beginning to look like scientists deciding on a conclusion and then massaging the facts to meet it. They continue to use thermometer records because they suit the case, not because they are accurate. Even this fails to make a case when closely examined. The records  show that temperatures in the early 20^th Century were higher than  stated. Whether this is due to tinkering with the raw data is unclear. But it looks possible that the trend has been cooler, not warmer.

 

The most realistic conclusion is that in the past 100 years there has been no appreciable climate change that matters.

 

And that is not something to be welcomed by the institutions and assorted freeloaders aboard the Great Green Gravy Train.