The past 8 years are the hottest on record

Kip Hansen Briefing — January 10, 2023

Another lesson on how to write a Good news story like a Climate Crisis story. One has to give it to climate fanatics – especially in the field of journalism. In my once-favorite, world-famous newspaper, the New York Times, this story.

“Via Henry’s Fountain and Mira Rojanasakul January 10, 2023

European climate researchers said on Tuesday that the world was still warming up last year, with extreme summer temperatures in Europe, China and elsewhere contributing to 2022. became the fifth hottest year on record.

The eight hottest years on record have now occurred since 2014, scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Agency report, and 2016 remains the hottest year ever. now.”

Here’s the full story in three images:

The image on the left appeared in the New York Times article. The image on the right is from NOAA’s Climate overview Global time series Page. Clicking on the link will show the chart image (Note: I have reduced the horizontal size to fit the Times image).

Compare the two images and except for some slight differences in the 2015, 2016 and 2017 numerical values, they are pretty much the same.

But (always but), the NOAA chart can show, in the upper right corner, the trendline for 2015-2022, the “8 years at least” highlighted in the NY Times article.

Here’s a detailed image of that corner, with the text retyped for clarity).

Adding this trendline is an option on the original official NOAA page – see for yourself. (repeated link for your convenience).

The New York Times authors, Henry Fountain and Mira Rojanasakul, simply don’t mention the positive story that the past eight years have tended to be minus 0.87°C/century.

Candlestick good news story which could have been written based on the same facts – the same data – that is NOAA calculation Global land and ocean from January to December temperature anomalies has been on a strong downward trend since 2015.

And that’s the summary.

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Author’s comments:

My long term advice is “Don’t draw trend lines on the chart.” Slope of the trend line always depends on the start and end points. That is [almost] it’s always more informative to see the data itself, in various graphical forms, than drawing lines on top of the data. Trendlines are not data – it is the “opinion” of whoever is plotting trends (or graphing software programmers) regarding start and end dates.

This is true even for data that appear to have a clear start date or a very long data set over time, such as the modern global thermometer temperature suite. The global temperature does not start at the time it begins to be measured.

It should be noted that two El Niños occurred during the periods in question: 2014–16 and 2018–19.

Journalism, by its own standards, is meant to provide an objective, comprehensive, balanced view of the subject matter of a news story. The eight-year downtrend certainly warrants at least one mention in the “global” temperature story over the past eight years.

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