Conservatives are again denying the very existence of global warming | Dana Nuccitelli

The best efforts to undermine the established climate science behind the Endangerment Finding are pathetically badAs we well know, climate myths are like zombies that never seem to die. It’s only a matter of time before they rise from the dead and threaten to eat our brains. And so here we go again – American conservatives are denying the very existence of global warming.Here's a histogram of the global land adjustments from NOAA. Also, I'm attaching an image comparing raw and adj global land/ocean temps. pic.twitter.com/BSZXVB9uQwWhat they don’t tell you is that the 1980 record in question only comes from around 500 land stations almost entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and does not include any ocean data at all. There is a well-known warm period in the mid-to-high latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere in the 1930s and 1940s, but it does not really show up much in the oceans and not at all in the Southern Hemisphere. As scientists have collected more historical temperature records from around the world in the past 35 years, we have created more complete records that show less warmth in that period simply because they cover more of the planet. Ultimately all of these comparisons to past records are a bit of a distraction. We have all the raw temperature records today, and we can compare them to the adjusted data to see what, exactly, adjustments do to the temperature record. It turns out that adjustments actually result in less warming over the past century, not more. If we scientists were “cooking the books,” we are doing so in the wrong direction. Continue reading...