James Delingpole is an invective-hurling anti-climate science columnist who has candidly admitted that he doesn’t bother to read scientific papers, calling himself a “an interpreter of interpretations.”
Yesterday, the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology tweeted a link to one of Delingpole’s polemics published on the white nationalist website Breitbart, in which Delingpole paraphrased a Daily Mail writer with a similar history of mischaracterizing climate science.
The article in question took the position that by cherry-picking temperature readings — measuring overland readings and ignoring oceanic measurements — you could prove that the planet was getting cooler.
Rose’s Daily Mail story used satellite measurements of atmospheric temperatures over land only to argue that a temperature drop since the middle of the year “proves” that the warmest-year records set by 2014, 2015, and (soon) 2016 have nothing to do with global warming. Instead, Rose claims it was all due to the El Niño conditions in the Pacific—a claim that is very clearly false since the long-term warming is much larger than the year-to-year variation caused by El Niño and La Niña. Even Rose’s chosen dataset shows the long-term warming trend.
After a particularly strong El Niño in 1997 and 1998 drove the global average surface temperature to a major record, those who reject the conclusions of climate science spent years claiming that global warming stopped in 1998. When the long-term warming trend started surpassing the old 1998 record again, the popular excuse was “Well, that’s just because this is a warm El Niño year!” After 2015 absolutely crushed the record, some climate scientists joked about how long it would take for someone to claim that now global warming had stopped in 2015. If you had “less than 1 year” in an office pool, congratulations.
US House Science Committee tweets Breitbart climate misinformation
[Scott K Johnson/Ars Technica]