Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists

Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists

by James Delingpole30 Nov 20161,203

Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.

But the news has been greeted with an eerie silence by the world’s alarmist community. You’d almost imagine that when temperatures shoot up it’s catastrophic climate change which requires dramatic headlines across the mainstream media and demands for urgent action. But that when they fall even more precipitously it’s just a case of “nothing to see here”.
The cause of the fall is a La Nina event following in the wake of an unusual strong El Nino.
As David Rose reports:

Big El Ninos always have an immense impact on world weather, triggering higher than normal temperatures over huge swathes of the world. The 2015-16 El Nino was probably the strongest since accurate measurements began, with the water up to 3C warmer than usual.

It has now been replaced by a La Nina event – when the water in the same Pacific region turns colder than normal.

This also has worldwide impacts, driving temperatures down rather than up.

The satellite measurements over land respond quickly to El Nino and La Nina. Temperatures over the sea are also falling, but not as fast, because the sea retains heat for longer.

This means it is possible that by some yardsticks, 2016 will be declared as hot as 2015 or even slightly hotter – because El Nino did not vanish until the middle of the year.

But it is almost certain that next year, large falls will also be measured over the oceans, and by weather station thermometers on the surface of the planet – exactly as happened after the end of the last very strong El Nino in 1998. If so, some experts will be forced to eat their words.

Yes indeed. I recommend this sober assessment of the situation written earlier this month by Dr. David Whitehouse, science editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

With 2016 being predicted as a record warm year it is interesting to speculate on what the El Nino’s contribution will be, which is, in a word, everything. It can be argued that without the El Nino (and the so-called “Pacific Blob”) 2014-2016 would not have been record warm years.

He calls the cooling a “reality check”, noting:

Many think that 2017 will be cooler than previous years. Myles Allen of Oxford University says that by the time of the next big United Nations climate conference global temperatures are likely to be no warmer than the Paris COP in 2015. This would be a strange thing to happen if, as some climate scientists have claimed, recent years would have been a record even without the El Nino.

The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare. Thanks what’s now recognised as an unusually strong El Nino, global temperatures were driven to sufficiently high levels to revive the alarmist narrative – after an unhelpful pause period of nearly 20 years – that the world had got hotter than ever before.

It resulted in a slew of “Hottest Year Evah” stories from the usual suspects. As I patiently explained at the time – here, here, and here – this wasn’t science but propaganda. If you’re a reader of Breitbart or one of the sceptical websites this will hardly have come as news to you. But, of course, across much of the mainstream media – and, of course, on all the left-leaning websites – these “Hottest Year Evah” stories were relayed as fact. And, inevitably, were often cited by a host of experts on Twitter as proof that evil deniers are, like, anti-science and totally evil and really should be thrown in prison for sacrificing the future of the world’s children by promoting Big-Oil-funded denialism.

This is why there is such an ideological divide regarding climate change between those on the left and those on the right. The lefties get their climate information from unreliable fake news sites like Buzzfeed.
Just recently, I had to school my former Telegraph colleague Tom Chivers, now of Buzzfeed, with a piece titled Debunked: Another Buzzfeed ‘Hottest Year Evah’ Story.
Perhaps I’m wrong: I don’t actually look at Buzzfeed, except when they’re doing something worthwhile like “Five Deadliest Killer Sharks” or “Ten Cutest Kitten Photos”. But I’ve a strong suspicion they haven’t yet covered this 1 degree C temperature fall because, well why would they? It just wouldn’t suit their alarmist narrative.