Let's just clear this up once and for all. Last year was HOT!

Deniers are busy protesting the hottest year on record. Climate disinformers are trying every trick in their book to persuade the dumb denier that it's not so. The dumb denier doesn't need persuading so it's not clear why professional disinformers bother. Perhaps it's to give them something they believe is half plausible (even though it's not). Or perhaps it's just so they can say "it's true - I read it in black and white at WUWT".

WUWT has had a few protest articles already. The latest is a repeat article from Bob Tisdale (archived here). It's not enough for Bob to bore the pants off readers - he has to do it over and over and over again. He's worried that they might have missed his message the last time because it was just one of many wrong messages in a very, very long, very tedious article, which I've covered already.

This time Bob's kept his words to a minimum (or what Bob Tisdale regards as a minimum) and managed by a miracle to stay on point - although he got the point wrong, as usual. (It must have taken a lot of self-discipline for him to do that.)

Now Bob knows that this year has been recorded as the hottest year on record. He knows that the odds of any other year having been hotter are quite low. Much lower than that this year is the hottest. And yet Bob and other deniers are all in a tizz about whether last year was the hottest or was it 2010 or 2005 and are going for full blown conspiracising - that the guvmint is trying to pull a fast one. Not on this topic they aren't.

Getting the numbers right!

Bob and other deniers try to tell you that there is less than a 50% chance that this year is the hottest on record. That's wrong - or should I say it's misleading. The deniers are misinterpreting the numbers.  The reason they got hold of the wrong end of the stick is because of the table that NASA and the NOAA provided at the time of their media conference:

Source: NOAA

David Sanger explained it here at HotWhopper. So what I've done is what I wish NASA and the NOAA had done, so that the professional and amateur climate disinformers would find it more difficult to misrepresent. Here's a version that might have stopped all the nonsense before it started:

I've done two things. I've shown that the percentages are meant to be compared to one another by putting in the total at 100%. I've also converted the percentages to odds (of a sort). The clear favourite is 2014 - from both NOAA and NASA.

David Sanger explained that the percentages mean that on the NASA scale, out of 100%, the most likely hottest year is 2014, at 38% odds. The next most likely is 2010 at 23% odds. That makes 2014 1.6 times more likely than 2010 to be the hottest year on record.

If you go by the NOAA calculations, then 2014 is at 48% odds on to be the hottest year. The next in the running is 2010 at only 18% odds. That means that 2014 is 2.7 times more likely than 2010 to be the hottest year on record.

It's not just David Sanger's comment - there's a tweet from Gavin Schmidt, Director of GISS at NASA.

@windbarb yes. Individual years are statistically close, but 2014 btw 1.5 and ~3 times likeliest to be warmest yr.
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) January 18, 2015

That's right. While individual years are close to being the record hot year, It's 1½ to almost three times more likely that 2014 is the hottest year in the record to date, than that the second ranked 2010 is.

This effort to dispute the fact that last year was the hottest on record is as silly as denier efforts trying to dispute the 97% consensus. That is, the fact that 97% of science papers that attribute a reason for global warming, attribute it to human activity - principally the burning of fossil fuel.

The ice age isn't coming, folks

The real story for deniers is that the ice age WUWT has been promising them just isn't anywhere to be found. It doesn't really matter whether this year or 2010 was the hottest, the current record will soon be broken again in any case. What matters is that the world is heating up. That we're causing it. That we can stop it before it gets too bad.

Oh, and if you want to look at decadal temperatures, I did a chart for Judith Curry to counter her "past ten years" of denial. That's the real story. That last year was part of a trend to a hotter world.

If you want to rub salt into deniers' wounds, here's another chart, from Gavin Schmidt this time. It also shows very clearly how much hotter the world is getting:

From the WUWT comments

Poor old johnmarshall thinks a record hot 2014 is a "nail in the coffin" of global warming. He's nuts.

January 19, 2015 at 3:15 am
Thanks Bob, another nail in the coffin of CAGW.

nigelf  is under some illusion that a US denier politician, Ted Cruz, will stop global warming. Sacking scientists won't stop global warming.

January 19, 2015 at 3:16 am
They should realize that the Dem’s won’t be in power forever and when that happens the hammer comes down. With Ted Cruz in charge of NASA’s oversight this might come very swiftly. 

M Courtney believes the lies of disinformers like Bob Tisdale. Like most deniers at WUWT, he's a tendency to embrace paranoid conspiracies. It suits his view of the world. He's no head for numbers and doesn't venture far from the safety of WUWT, for fear he'll be contaminated by facts.

January 19, 2015 at 3:53 am
No, there is less than 50% chance that there is no year likelier to have been hottest than 2014.
And the press release misled people into thinking it was more than 50%. Nick, you are still deceived by that media hype.
Doesn’t the lack of integrity at NASA and NOAA disturb you? 

Jimbo has it completely wrong.  The disinformers have been successful at confusing dumb deniers. It's not hard to do. Tell a denier that coal is plant food and they'll love you forever:

 January 19, 2015 at 5:12 amLet’s put it this way:
GISS is 62% certain that 2014 was NOT the hottest year on the record. It’s called spin Nick Stokes and no one is going to spin me. Politicians, journalists and now climastrologists are engaged in this dark art.

GISS has run the numbers and found that the odds of 2014 being the hottest year on record is about 1.6 times greater than that the next hottest 2010 was.


If you want to see the insular mindset of deniers, how about this comment from BruceC, who couldn't imagine venturing outside the safety of deniersville to realclimate.org.  Too scary.

January 19, 2015 at 5:29 am
May I ask a simple, slightly O/T question?
Is Gavin Schmidt allowed to reply or make a guest post here? Is he barred, or is it just a case of him not wanting to share the stage with his critics like a certain, recent TV interview?
Just asking.

The only reason Anthony Watts would have an article by a climate scientist would be so that he can let his lynch mob loose on them. Deniers enjoy that. It's one of the main reasons they go to WUWT.