Climate Deniers Go Back to the Classics

Incredible as it seems, climate denial is in a bit of a renaissance, with special attention being paid to the “Old Masters” of long debunked pseudo-science cons.

Shameless tobacco shill and science denier Steven Milloy took this slice of the recently updated global temperature record and applied a Nimitz-class cherry pick. Cartoonist Scott Adams chimed in.
We’ve been thru this nonsense before with the “It hasn’t warmed since 1998” scam, which I’ve dealt with many times, most recently above.
You start with a warm year – 2016 was an El Nino year and the warmest on record – and then you draw your line from there.

We know that global atmospheric temps bounce around a bit on their steady rise, but when you look at larger slices, like decadal periods, but warming trend emerges unmistakably. The graph below is from Admiral David Titley’s presentation in the video above.

Of course, Milloy and co. know their audience is near illiterate scientifically – so they’re not too concerned about losing followers. But scientists know that the best measure of planetary warming is not atmospheric temperatures, which can fluctuate year to year, but ocean heat.
A new paper address latest measurements of ocean heat, and it’s sobering.

Washington Post:

The amount of excess heat buried in the planet’s oceans, a strong marker of climate change, reached a record high in 2022, reflecting more stored heat energy than in any year since reliable measurements were available in the late 1950s, a group of scientists reported Wednesday.

That eclipses the ocean heat record set in 2021 — which eclipsed the record set in 2020, which eclipsed the one set in 2019. And it helps to explain a seemingly ever-escalating pattern of extreme weather events of late, many of which are drawing extra fuel from the energy they pull from the oceans.

“If we keep breaking records, it’s kind of like a broken record,” said John Abraham, a climate researcher at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and one of the authors of the new research published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

The planet’s air temperature has been rising for decades, but it wobbles up and down and does not set records every single year. Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service recently ranked 2022 as the fifth-hottest year on record for the atmosphere, with other expertrankings soon to follow.

The ocean doesn’t do the same dance. It changes more slowly — and more deeply. As climate change takes hold, natural ocean variations in temperature matter less and less, Abraham said, leading to a string of consecutive records in recent years, with 2018 being the last year that was not a record.

More than 90 percent of the excess warming that results from the planetary energy imbalance, in which more solar heating enters the Earth’s system than escapes again to space, winds up in the ocean, the researchers say.

Scientists began their record of ocean heat in 1958 because it is when measurements became dense enough, and accurate enough, to give a full global picture of the temperature trends down to considerable depths.

“Oceans contain an enormous amount of water, and compared to other substances, it takes a lot of heat to change the temperature of water,” Linda Rasmussen, a retired researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the work, said in an email. “The fact that we’re seeing such clear increases in ocean heat content, extending over decades now, shows that there is a significant change underway.”

The new research suggests that the rise in heat contained within the upper roughly 1.25 miles of ocean water — an increase driven by a massive amount of absorbed energy measured in units known as zettajoules — represents the true pulse of climate change.

UPDATE:

Wow, they are going ALL the way back.