Hottest Year Ever Claims Are Propaganda, Not Science

stevengoddard.wordpress.com

9 points·jayess··6 comments

Interesting to see this posted here. S. Goddard is probably the master of cherry-picking in all things climate and turned it into kind of art. He virtuously exploits the fact that to debunk his assertions you have to come up with something more complicated. So, people fail using Occam's razor. Also, he has a good eye for counter-intuitive connections: Sea ice around Antarctic is most probably increasing because of a warming planet. But explain this to a layman...

Notice how this article, which presents actual data, as opposed to the NYT's summary of a press release, immediately got removed from HN's front page when it got enough votes to appear there.

If you look closely at the source for the charts, most don't actually show what the author purports them to show. For instance, the first chart actually references a tropical average rather than a global average -- and it's well-known that warming seems greater closer to the poles than close to the equator.

That said, the title is arguably correct. Because there's no good agreed-upon definition on what it means to be the "hottest year on record", such a claim is not especially scientific.

So I pulled the global RSS satellite temperature data from the RSS site and did a quick excel chart. I don't see a difference:

https://imgur.com/opgZeoQ

So which "don't actually show what the author purports them to show."

I'm sure it's a conspiracy from Big Climate.

It could be propaganda if there were a political or totalitarian purpose behind the claim. Scientific measurements, and related hypotheses, are not in that realm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com