“Earth passed a feared global warming milestone”
Are you feeling doomed? Good because we’re in double-secret doom territory now. If you scoff, just check out this latest terrifying ‘milestone’ of doom.
Earth passed a feared global warming milestone Friday, at least briefly – Washington Post
Global warming? I thought we switched over to climate change. But climate science is about whatever’s convenient. Now that there’s some warming to discuss, we can go back to calling it global warming. And it really is warming.
The planet marked an ominous milestone Friday: The first day global warmth crossed a threshold, if only briefly, that climate scientists have warned could have calamitous consequences.
Preliminary data show global temperatures averaged more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above a historic norm, from a time before humans started consuming fossil fuels and emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Ominous milestones are my favorite kind.
This is a big deal in warmunist circles. A number of the UN agreements are built around keeping temperatures down to this hypothetical number above “pre-industrial levels.”
But wait a minute, you may ask, if you’re not a mindless zombie, what does that even mean?
The industrial revolution began around the time of the American Revolution, but when warmunists use ‘pre-industrial’, they mean 1850-1900.
Why? Because they randomly make stuff up. Also, it avoids acknowledging that we didn’t remotely have reliable temperature records in the 1780s. Until the 1880s there was limited temperature data outside the Western world.
But how reliable are our temperature records even from 1880 compared to today? They don’t just have to be reliable, but reliable enough that we can finely compare our current high-end measurements and keep our temperatures to 1.5 c above theirs.
In the real world, much of that data is absolutely not reliable and we may not even be measuring the same things.
Temperature data from hundreds of years ago is no easier to process if it’s been obtained at sea. In 2004, for example, a team of researchers analyzing data from 18th- and 19th-century ships’ logs had to correct for the fact that in those days, sea-surface temperatures were measured with a thermometer in a bucket of seawater.
Thermometer enclosures, which shield the temperature sensor from direct sunlight and other sources of radiation, can be wooden or plastic; the variation in materials can, in turn, introduce discrepancies in the results (which some stations in the U.S. discovered firsthand in the 1980s when they switched from traditional enclosures to electronic screens). The instruments are also sensitive to their surroundings: If you measure the temperature on a sunny day versus a cloudy day, direct sunlight on the thermometer will record a higher temperature, even if the two days are equally warm.
But I’m sure we can certainly be certain of that 1 c degree mark from the “pre-industrial era”.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
