Was 2014 Really the Warmest Year Ever? | Power Line:
The New York Times features one of the most misleading headlines ever:
“2014 Was the Warmest Year Ever Recorded on Earth.”
The first paragraph drives the hysteria home:
Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history, scientists reported on Friday, underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.
It would be hard to pack more misinformation into a single sentence.
First, the Times headline, and countless others like it, convey the impression that 2014 was the hottest year ever!
But note the paper’s reference to “recorded history.”
If you keep reading, you see that “recorded history” goes back only to 1880.
But in 1880, the Little Ice Age had just ended, and the Earth was beginning to warm after several hundred years in the deep freeze.
So, yes, temperatures are a little warmer now than they were then–happily.
Indeed, the Earth may still be recovering to more average temperature levels after the Little Ice Age.
The Times and other news outlets deliberately try to create the impression that today’s temperatures are unprecedented.
But that is simply false.
In fact, the Earth was warmer than it is now for about 90% of the time since the end of the last Ice Age approximately 12,000 years ago.
This graph is based on Greenland ice cores.
Note that over the last 12,000 years, there is zero correlation between temperature and CO2 levels:
So 2014 was far from the warmest year ever. On the contrary, we are living during a relatively cool period.
