The latest satellite data analyzed by the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) confirms the globe keeps warming, as the chart above clearly shows.
But the climate science deniers at the GOP-led House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology apparently can’t read a simple graph. Instead, they tweeted that the satellite data “tells a story climate alarmists don’t want to hear.”
Sat data tells a story climate alarmists don’t want to hear. It doesn’t fit their climate narrative! https://t.co/Myrev2QtW9
— Sci,Space,&Tech Cmte (@HouseScience) January 3, 2017
They were particularly confused, it appears, by the headline they link to — “Global Satellites: 2016 not Statistically Warmer than 1998” — from UAH scientist and meteorologist Roy Spencer.
Spencer is a leading climate confusionist who low-balled satellite temperatures for nearly a decade due to “serial errors in the data analysis.” Spencer has said, “I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.”
So rather than, say, providing the public the best science, Spencer sees his “job” as persuading the public not to support efforts to reduce carbon pollution.
So it’s no surprise that Spencer chose such a misleading headline, despite the fact that his own chart’s running 13-month average clearly shows that temperatures are rising.
The Science Committee’s in-house Tweeter apparently isn’t a big reader, or else they would have seen Spencer’s list of “the 38 years in the satellite record, ranked from warmest to coolest” where the hottest years are all after 1997 and the coldest years are all before 1994.
And they don’t appear to have read any of the UAH’s 2016 monthly “Global Temperature Reports” — since every single one of them begins:
“Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978 +0.12 C [0.22F] per decade.”
The NASA land and ocean temperature data shows an even faster trend, exceeding 0.16°C (0.29°F) per decade:
Why does the NASA data show faster warming? Remember, NASA’s data directly measures the temperature at the surface — where we live. The satellites indirectly measure the temperature of the lower atmosphere, where we don’t.
As an aside, the responses by actual scientists to this inane tweet are a must read.
Ironically their own data shows clear warming trend from 1979 to present. It fits climate narrative.
— Jeremy McGibbon (@jeremy_mcgibbon) January 4, 2017
House [Anti-] Science Committee is at it again, somehow using the hottest year ever recorded to attack "climate alarmists" https://t.co/gvAN6m4hqe
— Dana Nuccitelli (@dana1981) January 4, 2017
As ThinkProgress has reported, most of the GOP members of the House Science Committee “reject the science behind human-caused global warming.” So it’s no big surprise they are chart-challenged.
But in a few weeks, our anti-science, pro-pollution Congress will be joined by a like-minded president and Cabinet. The threat to the health and well-being of our children — and the next 50 generations — will be greater than it has been in recent memory.