20150123 - hottest year

Was 2014 really 'the hottest year ever’?

From the Met Office to Nature and the BBC, the usual suspects have been at it, writes Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker

The Telegraph, 7:01PM GMT 10 Jan 2015

An ever-more curious riddle has arisen over the rush by all the usual suspects to proclaim that 2014 was “the hottest year in history”.

From the Met Office to Nature and the BBC, they’ve all been at it, using as their latest “proof” a graph from the Japanese met office showing global surface temperatures having steadily risen to last year’s peak as the “warmest since records began”.

We know what they’re up to, ever since they began playing it around the time of last month’s UN climate conference in Lima. They are trying to whip up hysteria in support of that global climate treaty they hope to see signed in Paris next December. Their claims may come as a surprise to those in eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East as far south as Jerusalem, for whom this winter has been unusually cold; let alone those in North America where satellite pictures last week showed Canada and much of the US snow-bound.

But such “anecdotal evidence” apart, what none of these excitable accounts mention is the startlingly different picture given by the two main official records of world temperatures measured by satellites, as published by the RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) and the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH). These are much more comprehensive than the surface records, which have been increasingly questioned for the gaps in their global weather station coverage and for the regular one-sided “adjustments” made to their data, invariably downgrading earlier temperatures and raising those for recent years.

Both RSS and UAH agree that 2014 was far from being the hottest year ever, ranking it only sixth in the past 18 years, and that there has been no upward trend in world temperatures since 1997. This discrepancy between the surface and satellite records is now so glaring that it should be the subject of a full-scale scientific investigation. But this is no more likely to happen than that the warmists will get that treaty they are dreaming of, committing the world to a devastating reduction in CO2 emissions. India and China, who call the shots, are not taken in by all this nonsense.