Climate Extrasensory Perception

A recent post Climate Hearsay featured an article by Ross McKitrick noting how climatists rely on charts and graphs to alarm people about temperatures too small for them to notice otherwise. For example, NOAA each month presents temperature measurements globally and broken down in various ways. To illustrate McKitrick’s point, let’s look at the results for Quarter 1 of 2019, January through March. Source: Global Climate ReportSo the chart informs us that for this 3 month period, the whole world had its third warmest year out of the last 140 years! It was a full 0.27℃ hotter on average over those 90 days. Well, maybe not, because the error range is given as +/- 0.15℃. So the difference this year from the record year 2016 might have been only a few 0.01℃, and no way you could have noticed that. In fact where I live in Montreal, it didn’t seem like a warm year at all.

McKitrick also makes the point that claiming a country like Canada warmed more than twice the global average proves nothing. In a warming period, any place on land will warm faster than the global surface which is 71% ocean. For example, consider NOAA’s first quarter report on the major continents.

Surprise, surprise: North American temperatures ranked 38th out of 110 years, more than 2℃ cooler than 2016. That’s more like what I experienced, though many days were much colder. And browse the list of other land places: it was not that warm anywhere except for Oceania, which is mostly comprised of Australia.

Summary

Global warming/climate change is one of those everywhere, elsewhere phenomena. Taking masses of temperatures and averaging them into a GMT (Global Mean Temperature Anomaly) is an abstraction, not anyone’s reality. And in addition, minute changes in that abstraction are too small for anyone to sense. Yet, modern civilization is presumed to be in crisis over 1.5℃ of additional warming, which we apparently already got in Canada and we are much better for it.