Today is Earth Day, an environmentalist "holiday" cofounded by a murderer. Liberals and other science fetishists are marking the occasion by showing how much they care:
Heading down to DC to catch an #EarthDay flight on Air Force One tomorrow with the President. We're going to #ActOnClimate.
— Bill Nye (@BillNye) April 21, 2015
Because nothing says "I love the Earth" like riding on a luxury jumbo jet that literally pumps pollution into the atmosphere. Failed presidential candidate John Kerry tweeted about the Earth Day op-ed he wrote for USA Today:
This #EarthDay, I’m calling on Americans & concerned citizens everywhere to crank up the volume: let’s #ActOnClimate: http://t.co/6R2aibW3nR — John Kerry (@JohnKerry) April 22, 2015
Kerry's op-ed includes the oft-cited claim that 2014 was the "hottest year on record."
Our world is fundamentally changing. Fourteen of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. Last year was the warmest of all.
Climate activists tout this as evidence that climate change is just like slavery and that we need to ACT NOW by removing roughly $10 trillion from the economy, or else. This is a rather extraordinary claim, especially coming from a group of people who profess to be so concerned with "what science says."
When it comes to the "hottest year on record" claim, what the science actually says is a lot more nuanced than climate activists would prefer, even if it won't stop them from repeating it over and over again. First of all, "on record" sounds like a long time; some people have even suggested that 2014 was the warmest year in "recorded history," which sounds like an even longer time. What it actually means is "since 1880."
Secondly, the source of this claim, a report published by NASA, acknowledges a significant amount of uncertainty in its estimates, as is often the case in science. "Numerically, our best estimate for the global temperature of 2014 puts it slightly above (by 0.01C) that of the next warmest year (2010) but by much less than the margin of uncertainty," the report states. "Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year… the Earth’s average temperature for the past decade has changed very little" [emphasis added].
So, when people say "last year was the hottest on record," they're actually saying: "Some scientists think 2014 might have been the warmest year since 1880. According to their calculations, it was about 0.01 degrees warmer than the next warmest year, but it might have been colder, they're not entirely sure. Either way, it's in line with the average temperature over the last decade, which hasn't changed much, despite the hysteria."
Please panic appropriately.
