It was inevitable that when the current extra-strong El Nino resulted in some anomalously hot months the climate alarmists would declare victory, and, sure enough, when Drs. John Christy and Roy Spencer of University of Alabama Huntsville announced that the satellite global temperature data showed February the hottest month in the satellite record (which goes all the way back to the practically prehistoric year of 1979!), they did. One example among many: Mary Papenfuss’s article in International Business Times March 10, “Hot February shatters records as scientists warn global warming is advancing more rapidly.”

Papenfuss was positively breathless: “This year is shaping up to be possibly the hottest in human history after satellite readings showed how February obliterated the temperature record set in January.”

“Human history?” Well, human history back to 1979, anyway. Because of incomparability of data and measuring devices (direct and indirect), we simply don’t know how February compares, or how 2016 will compare, with all previous months or years of human history.

“Shatters”? “Obliterated”? Geez Louise! February’s global temperature anomaly (departure from the 1981–2010 average) was 0.83C, a whopping ~0.05C higher than the hottest month of 1998, another year heavily affected by a strong El Nino. (The margin of error is bigger than that.)

For the record, February’s 0.83C anomaly from the 1981–2010 average is ~1/25th of the difference between the low and high temperatures recorded for my zip code today, and the ~0.05C by which February “obliterated” the previously warmest month in the satellite record is a whole 1/400th of that difference. As Richard Lindzen is fond of putting it, the appropriate response to such minute changes in global average temperature is, “So what?”

Papenfuss and other Chicken Littles might have benefited from reading Spencer’s comments when he reported the February data, including this:

The February warmth is likely being dominated by the warm El Nino conditions, which tends to have peak warmth in the troposphere close to February…but it appears that isn’t the whole story, since the tropical anomaly for February 2016 (+0.99 C) is still about 0.3 C below the February 1998 value during the super-El Nino of that year. In addition to the expected tropical warmth, scattered regional warmth outside the tropics led to a record warm value for extratropical Northern Hemispheric land areas, with a whopping +1.46 C anomaly in February … fully 0.5 deg. C above any previous monthly anomaly (!)

Spencer, by the way, is on record predicting that 2016 will probably be the hottest year in the (satellite) record (yes, the one that goes all the way back to 1979) because typically (though not absolutely always) the second year of an El Nino pair is warmer than the first. But that hasn’t changed his mind about whether anthropogenic CO2 emissions are driving long-term, unprecedented global warming. Why not? Because he knows the difference between short-term changes driven by one cause and long-term changes driven by another.

That may be a really difficult concept for people like Papenfuss to get their heads around, but, hey, we can hope.

 

 

Featured image courtesy of Dr. Roy W. Spencer.