2020, climate statistics and all that
Date: 15/01/21
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years.
Every year in the middle of January various organisations, The UK Met Office, NASA, NOAA, etc. release their estimates of the annual average global temperature of our planet.
This year the conclusion is that 2020 is statistically identical to 2016. Some have placed it the second whereas the Japanese Meteorological Agency has it as the third warmest of the modern era. The overall conclusion to be drawn however is the misunderstanding of statistics used to support a predetermined opinion.
To illustrate the point let’s just look at NOAA’s data. This has a temperature anomaly for 2020 of 0.98 +/- 0.15 °C compared to 1.00 +/- 0.15 °C for 2016 (which was the year with the strongest recorded El Nino). The difference is trivial, especially since the precision of the mean is reported to thousandths of a degree. Looking at NOAA’s data for previous years you can see that every year since 2015 falls within one standard deviation of the mean.
https://www.thegwpf.com/2020-climate-statistics-and-all-that/
