Poor and needy starved of billions of tax dollars in favor of decades of cooling, a warming hiatus, CO2 skyrocketing amid flat temps, none predicted or explained for billions of taxpayer dollars diverted to UN jet setters. Peer reviewed study says single global temp isn't mathematically possible anyway-Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby.

$2 billion a day is spent on the notion of CO2 danger that could be spent helping the poor and needy.

1/29/15, "No, 2014 wasn’t the ‘warmest year in history’," Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby, opinion

"Other compilers of the standard global temperature datasets have been more circumspect. The report from the UK Met Office noted only that “2014 was one of the warmest years in a record dating back to 1850.” Given the size of the margin of error, it acknowledged, “It’s not possible to definitively say which of several recent years was the warmest.” Similarly, the Berkeley Earth summary of its 2014 calculations explained that last year’s bottom line was statistically identical to other recent years.

“Therefore,” it noted candidly, “it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”

All of which reasonably leads to the conclusion not that the planet has been relentlessly warming, but that the warming trend that peaked at the end of the 1990s has neither resumed nor reversed. Global warming has more or less been on hold since the turn of the 21st century. That hiatus poses something of an inconvenient truth to those who believe that anthropogenic carbon-dioxide is the key driver of climate change, since CO2 emissions have continued without letup.

You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that climate is complicated and hard to get right. Climate models have so far been unable to accurately predict changes in global temperature. Experts didn’t foresee the global cooling that began in the 1940s and didn’t anticipate the warming cycle that started in the late 1970s. Climate science is still in its infancy, and it would be folly to treat any single explanation for changes in global temperatures as impervious to challenge or skepticism.

In fact, the very idea of a “global temperature” is hard to make sense of. How can an entire planet, with its multifarious systems, be said to have a temperature, or even an average temperature? 

Averaging is a familiar and useful concept that we use in a myriad of contexts. Average household income, average life expectancy, average weight of airline passengers, average number of earned runs given up by a pitcher, average daily temperature in Waikiki in April — each is a comprehensible and meaningful statistic. But as the authors of a provocative 2007 paper in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics explain, there are certain kinds of variables that lose all meaning if they are averaged. For example, exchange rates are extremely useful when comparing two currencies. The notion of a “global exchange rate,” however, would be absurd. 

Temperatures on the earth are in constant flux. They change with latitude, with time of day, with season, with weather; they vary from ocean depths to atmospheric heights, from the equator to the poles. Even assuming that the necessary raw data could be properly gathered, mathematicians must choose among multiple averaging techniques, which can yield flatly contradictory results. 

Physically, there is no such thing as the “global temperature trend,” the authors conclude. Hence, “ranking this or that year as the ‘warmest of the millennium’ is not possible, since other averages will give other results with no grounds for choosing among them.”

As headline fodder, “warmest year ever” may be irresistible. As an unassailable reality on which critical public policy questions should turn? Be skeptical." via Hockey Schtick

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1/26/15, "2014 one of the warmest years on record globally," ukmetoffice.gov.uk

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6/10/13, "What to Make of a Warming Plateau," NY Times, Justin Gillis


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2006, "Does a Global Temperature Exist?"

"There is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming."...

Per Boston Globe article, this paper was published in "Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics," in 2007.
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3/15/2007, "Global temperature -- politics or science?" University of Copenhagen, EurekAlert

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12/10/14, "Hot Stuff, Cold Logic," The American Interest, Richard Tol

"A fifth of official development aid is now diverted to climate policy. Money that used to be spent on strengthening the rule of law, better education for girls, and improved health care, for instance, is now used to plug methane leaks and destroy hydrofluorocarbons. Some donors no longer support the use of coal, by far the cheapest way to generate electricity. Instead, poor people are offered intermittent wind power and biomass energy, which drives up the price of food. But the self-satisfaction environmentalists derive from these programs does not put food on poor peoples’ tables.

In sum, while climate change is a problem that must be tackled, we should not lose our sense of proportion or advocate solutions that would do more harm than good. Unfortunately, common sense is sometimes hard to find in the climate debate. Desmond Tutu recently compared climate change to apartheid.¹ Climate experts Michael Mann and Daniel Kammen compared it to the “gathering storm” of Nazism in Europe before World War II.² That sort of nonsense just gets in the way of a rational discussion about what climate policy we should pursue, and how vigorously we should pursue it. (end of article)

¹Tutu, “We Fought Apartheid. Now Climate Change Is Our Global Enemy”, Guardian, September 20, 2014.

²Mann and Kammen, “The Gathering Storm”, Huffington Post, September 19, 2014."

"Richard Tol teaches economics at the University of Sussex and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a veteran of four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." via Judith Curry, 12/26/14

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