Here’s the Secret Data Climate Scientists Are Hiding From Us

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For years, the more dimwitted of the climate denialists have been yammering on about a pause in global warming. This is not based on the measurements and models that even some climate scientists are puzzled about. It’s based on using a chart that begins in 1998, which was an unusually warm El Niño year. By using a very warm starting point and a more ordinary ending point, they make it look like nothing much has been going on for over a decade.

It’s all nonsense. But two can play at that game. Last year was quite warm, and this year is warmer still. From the New York Times: “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American agency that tracks worldwide temperatures, announced Wednesday that last month had been the hottest September on record, and that the January-to-September period had also been the hottest since 1880. Scientists say it is now all but certain that the full year will be the hottest on record, too.”

Hmmm. 2008 was a bit of an outlier on the cool side. So I think I’ll start there and end in 2015. Handily for me, NOAA now has a nice interactive tool that allows me to chart any period I want and even calculates the trend line for me. This generated the chart on the right. Naturally, I changed the y-axis to Fahrenheit in order to produce bigger, more dramatic numbers. Oh, and I started the y-axis at 0.8 °F instead of zero, because that produces a steeper, more apocalyptic trend line.

So there you have it. Proof positive that global temperatures are skyrocketing at a pace of 0.58 degrees per decade. This is the news that climate “scientists” in the pay of Big Fossil have been hiding from us. If you can’t trust a chart based directly on NOAA data, what can you trust?

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate