20 February 2019
January 2019 Was Third Hottest On Record, and No It’s Not a”Natural Cycle.”
Posted by Dan Satterfield
NOAA announced today that January was the third hottest on record and the ten warmest have all been since 2002.
Think about that for a second. If you think that the climate is not changing, then that statistic is impossible to reconcile. Oh, you may say that this is just a warm period globally, and the thermometer record is not long enough to have any meaning. Well, that record is extended by very good proxies (like tree rings etc), and the January’s of this century are likely the warmest in thousands of years.
Still, doubt it?
Ok, then tell me where the heat is coming from because it’s all about the physics.
It has to come from somewhere, and we know that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know it because of thousands of experiments that have never been refuted and we understand it as well as we understand why the sky is blue. Look at the graph below and you will see what we know and also why the uncertainties that do exist are not enough to falsify the hard truth that it’s the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
IPCC Assessment Report 5.
This is the scientific truth, and while it may conflict with your political or world view, it’s still true. Go ahead and scream natural cycles all you want when we meteorologists post the data each month, but until you prove that graph wrong, no one is going to take you seriously.
I realized before age ten that if I thought some scientific finding was not true, I’d better learn an awful lot about it and then ask some experts why my idea was wrong. I instinctively knew that I should do this before telling every science body on the planet that they were in error! Additionally, I understood that if I failed to do so, I’d end up making a fool of myself.
Certainly, I’m not special and most people came to the same realization by the time they were a young adult, but my question here is why do some fail to gain the ability to recognize this?
(The answer, of course, is that it conflicts with their political worldview.)
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
Could you direct me to any of the “thousands of experiments” that prove such a small proportion of atmospheric CO2 traps heat?
Start with John Tyndal. He first published on it during the LINCOLN administration. Then Svante Arrhenius. Guy Calendar did great work on the subject as well back in the 1930’s and was first to realise that the atmosphere would not be saturated w/respect to CO2. It’s been well understood for 75 years. You will not find a paper in any reputable (Read that REAL) science journal that disputes it. Every science body on Earth accepts the physics by the way, but if you think they are wrong, write it up and submit it. The 235 ppm of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere (Pre-Industrial) keeps the planet about 33C warmer. We would be a snowball without that tiny amount of CO2.