I wrote Global Cooling almost exactly two years ago. In it I noted that my part of the UK had experienced a very cold winter, and I also observed that the database of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was showing a 0.52C year-on-year fall in global land and ocean surface temperature between February 2020 and February 2021. Since I wrote that, I have been keeping an eye on NOAA’s monthly global climate report with a view to seeing whether or not that cooling trend was continuing.

The strange thing I have noticed is that although land temperatures don’t seem to be doing anything dramatic, NOAA’s monthly reports are full of hyperbole about global temperatures generally. For instance, the report published earlier this month in respect of April 2023 assures us that “April 2023 was the fourth-warmest April for the globe in NOAA’s 174-year record.” Yet, at the same time, we learn that although “Africa had its fourth-warmest April on record”, “South America tied 2007 for its ninth-warmest April” and it was only the 22^nd warmest April on record in Asia, with the smallest April temperature anomaly since April 2010. In Pakistan, the national mean temperature for April was actually 0.26°C below the average. Meanwhile, North America, Europe and Oceania all saw April 2023 ranking outside the 20 warmest Aprils on record. Arctic sea ice saw only the eleventh smallest April extent on record (tied with April 2004). We are told that parts of Antarctica saw temperatures above average, but parts were below average, so there’s nothing much to see there either. Intriguingly, we also learn that “[l]ess than 1% of the world’s surface had a record-cold April.” That sounds pretty undramatic, but it does mean that some parts of the earth’s land mass saw a record cold month in records going back 174 years:

Coinciding with the release of the January 2023 Global Climate Report, the NOAA Global Surface Temperature (NOAAGlobalTemp) dataset version 5.1.0 replaced version 5.0.0. This new version includes complete global coverage and an extension of the data record back in time an additional 30 years to January 1850.

As for the year to date, it’s a similar story:

The January–April global surface temperature also ranked fourth warmest in the 174-year record at 1.03°C (1.85°F) above the 1901–2000 average of 12.6°C (54.8°F). According to NCEI’s statistical analysis, the year 2023 is very likely to rank among the 10 warmest years on record.

So, global warming continues unabated, then. Or does it? Not on land, it doesn’t. So far as the year to date is concerned, Europe and Africa apparently both come in with the third warmest, but South America saw only its seventh warmest first four months of the year, while Asia came in with the ninth warmest, North America with its fifteenth warmest, and Oceania tied with 1992 for the twenty-third warmest start to the year to date.

What is the explanation? It seems to be that sea surface temperature warming is ongoing (“Global ocean temperatures set a record high for Apr, and marked the second-highest ocean temperature on record for any month”), but that temperatures on land aren’t being so obliging to the alarmists. I thought I’d take a look at land temperature anomalies, and since 2016 is still said to be the warmest year on record, that seemed like a good place to start.

The global temperature across land surfaces for April 2016 set a new record, at 1.93C above the 20^th century average. By April 2017 that anomaly had collapsed to just 1.37C above the twentieth century average, and was the joint fourth highest April temperature in the (then) 130 year record, the same as 2000 and 2010. April 2018 saw another fall, albeit more modest, to 1.31C above the average, and was thus only the ninth warmest April within the database. April 2019 saw rising temperatures, and came in at 1.48C above the average, making it the joint third April (tied with 2012). April 2020 saw another rise, to 1.66C above the average, and the excitement was palpable – it was second only to 2016. April 2021, however, saw the significant temperature drop I noticed when writing two years ago. It was just 1.25C above the twentieth century average, and was in a paltry twelfth place in the record books. April 2022 came in at 1.45C, warming alarmist hearts, as it was back up to sixth place. Yet April this year was cooler again, at just 1.31C above the twentieth century average, and registering 11^th place in the record books. So here we are with land temperatures in April 2023 sitting at a whopping 0.62C below the record set in April 2016.

Of course, nobody will be talking about that. Interestingly, the northern hemisphere land temperature in April 2023 was only the 17^th highest on record, yet the southern hemisphere land temperature is said to be the second highest on record. Year to date, by the way, sees southern hemisphere land temperatures as the tenth warmest on record, but northern hemisphere land temperatures as the fourth highest on record. Make of all that what you will.

Meanwhile, I would welcome an explanation as to how the southern hemisphere land temperature for April 2023 can be the second highest on record, while its constituent parts were all ranking much lower in the record books. Remember – South America joint 9^th; Oceania outside the top twenty; Asia (granted it’s more a northern than a southern hemisphere continent), 22^nd warmest; and Africa (also straddling the equator), fourth warmest.

I can’t help wondering if there’s really much point to all of this. I’d also like to know more about the latest dataset version, but that’s for another day.

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By Jo Nova

The media is totally bought and sold

A bunch of giant Foundations (run by billionaires that also invest in renewable energy) gave Associated Press (AP) $8 million dollars last year to push the climate propaganda even harder than it has been running for the last 20 years.

In return AP, which calls itself a not-for-profit news agency took the grant and then ran 64 climate crisis or ESG stories in the next year. They called this surge a “sweeping climate journalism initiative”.

Sixty four stories doesn’t sound like much but AP stories are repeated in 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters. So 64 stories could really mean 83,200 stories.

The money came from the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium (James Murdoch, who is son of Rupert), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Looks like, smells like, advertising money for Renewable investors disguised as a grant?

At least some of these Billionaires may be paying for media stories that could improve the return on their green investments. According to InfluenceWatch, two years ago Quadrivium Foundation committed to invest $250 million US in BlackRock Inc for “green energy infrastructure”. Likewise the Rockefeller heirs invested in renewables years ago, and the Walton family have made hundreds of millions of dollars from solar power.

STUDY: AP Pushes Woke Terms Across 64 Climate Stories After $8M Grant from Leftist Orgs

Joseph Vazquez and Luis Corneli, Newsbusters

AP announced Feb. 15, 2022, that it would “significantly expand its climate coverage” with the goal to “infuse” the media landscape with climate journalism backed solely by private interest groups. AP called the new development a “sweeping climate journalism initiative” and claimed in its press release that it would retain “complete editorial control of all content.” AP also claims on its “About Us” page that it is in the business of “unbiased news,” which is little more than a pathetic joke. The so-called “journalism” AP has been doing on climate involves behaving like the de facto mouthpiece for its major left-wing donors who have an obsession with pushing apocalyptic climate narratives on the internet.

It’s a parody of journalism: AP said the money came “without strings” 

AP summarized Carovillano’s claim that “AP accepts money to cover certain areas but without strings attached; the funders have no influence on the stories that are done.” Carovillano, in this particular case, called the activist investment a “‘mutually beneficial arrangement.’”

And if politicians got free houses or holidays from companies they made laws about, they could just say it was a “mutually beneficial arrangement” right? And we would laugh out of town, any politician that said that.

“The AP is supposed to be a newswire service, reporting hard news,” Legal Senior Policy Fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute Steve Milloy told MRC Business. “But it has deteriorated into a climate propaganda outfit for left-wing foundations. The AP routinely reports just one side of any climate story. If it lets its readers know there is another side, that only occurs via bogus ‘fact-check’ articles that are intended for use by climate activists to get other outlets to censor climate skeptics.”

Because AP stories are run in many other news outlets, the propaganda is amplified but the payoff money gets laundered through the other outlets, which don’t mention the conflict of interest.

[Steve Milloy] continued: “The AP imagines that its corruption of the news is excused because it discloses on its website that it is being paid to report one-side of every climate story. But its stories are run by other media outlets who don’t make the necessary disclosures.”

Climate Depot founder Marc Morano also ripped apart AP’s unashamed partnership with left-wing groups in comments to MRC Business:

The media is not only ideology in sync with the climate agenda of our government, international organizations, academia, and the billionaire class, but they are also quite literally being paid to promote the climate scare. AP has received millions from ‘philanthropic grants’ to toss out all objectivity and balance in their reporting. The AP and the corporate media engage in paid press release journalism. The media has zero obligation to serve as watchdogs over government claims or policies and instead regurgitate the approved messaging of their paymasters.

It’s Climate hush money — it buys silence

The big problem with the current media is the total lack of any critical research or backgrounding, or cross-checks on the stories. When the IPCC says we are all doomed, AP says “we’re all doomed” — they don’t interview the Nobel Prize winners who disagree, or the men who walked on the moon, or any of the 30,000 scientists who can point out the flaws in the UN hyperbole.

AP News was founded in 1846. The original founders must be rolling in their graves.

If climate skeptics got $8m in funding from anywhere, the media would be all over it. But when one of the core groups of the media world sells out journalism to politically motivated vested interests most of the most lauded reporters in the world won’t even notice…