Motus Mentis

You’d have had to have been trapped in a snowdrift somewhere not to have heard by now that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has announced that 2014 was the warmest year in the history of Planet Earth (likely the whole solar system, if you’re an MSNBC viewer, though I’ll confess I haven’t tuned in since the announcement to make sure). You’d have had to do a little digging, though, to have learnt that if that’s so, it’s only by a statistically insignificant two hundredths of a degree, and not according to the satellite data, or that the director of GISS, Gavin Schmidt, has allowed as how the certainty of that “warmest year” claim is only 38%, or that there has been no statistically significant warming trend for many years, or that every year we remain on the effectively flat plane of the warmish plateau we’ve been on for a long time now means greater and greater divergence from the predictions of the climate models we were assured spelled certain and imminent doom if we didn’t take immediate and drastic action.

As always, my aim here is to make sure that our readers — who are as inquisitive and intelligent a group of independent thinkers as you’ll find anywhere online or off — hear both sides of the story: not just the muezzin‘s call to worship, but also the ghostly voices of the damned. With that in mind, here’s Actual Peer-Reviewed Climate Scientist Who Doesn’t Work For An Oil Company Judith Curry, offering her thoughts on the Warmest Year Ever.