The fuss made over contested decimal points in highly adjusted datasets of irrelevant factors only shows how unscientific the public debate is. It probably wasn’t the hottest year in the last 150, and even it was, who cares — that doesn’t tell us anything about the cause. (Remember when cause and effect used to matter to a scientist?) Natural forces like the Sun and clouds can cause hot years too. Even if it was “the hottest” in a short noisy segment, the world has been hotter before (and life on Earth thrived) and the climate models are still hopelessly wrong. If CO2 was a big driver of the climate, 2015 should have been a lot hotter.
1. It wasn’t the hottest year. Satellites have better, broader coverage, surveying almost the whole planet (rather than selected car parks, runways, etc. like the surface thermometers). The satellites say that both 1998 and 2010 were hotter. In any case, these kind of piddling noisy differences are just street signs on the road to nowhere — what matters are the long term trends, and the predictions of climate models. (If the models worked, [...]
