“Global warming” is not global; the northern hemisphere is cooling

“Global warming” is not global; the northern hemisphere is cooling

Rhoda Wilson

When climate alarmists market their “catastrophic anthropogenic climate change” agenda, it is, to a large degree, on the presumption that the Western World is causing “global warming.” The largest countries of the West are located in the northern hemisphere.  A Twitter user has pointed out an anomaly in monthly temperature changes demonstrating “global warming” is not global nor is the northern hemisphere, and therefore West, experiencing “warming.” 

Zacki tweeted two comparable graphs from Oxford University’s Our World in Data (“OWD”) which shows the temperature change from month to month for the last ten years.  One graph was for the northern hemisphere and the other for the southern hemisphere.  The graphs represent data for the combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature change given as the deviation from the 1951–1980 mean.  The data has been obtained from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”), Goddard Institute for Space Studies (“GISS”).

NASA has also used this data to create monthly temperature anomaly maps to show how much warmer or colder a region may be in a given month compared to the norm for that same month in the same region from 1951-1980. It’s important to reiterate that these maps do not depict absolute temperature but instead show temperature anomalies, or how much it has changed.

For a few years, NASA has been publishing animated figures, or videos, from the GISS data set that show the seasonal cycle in global temperature anomalies for every month since 1880 – showing how much the global monthly temperature was above or below the annual global mean from 1980–2015.  Below is the latest colour-coded video published by NASA. Normal temperatures are shown in white. Higher-than-normal temperatures are shown in red and lower-than-normal temperatures are shown in blue. Normal temperatures are calculated over the 30-year baseline period 1951-1980.

In 2020, two of America’s most respected and prolific atmospheric physicists, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen and University of Alabama in Huntsville professor John Christy wrote a paper to explain how the NASA/GISS data set – referred to by policy-makers and the media as the global surface temperature record – is actually obtained and where it fits into the popular narrative associated with climate alarm.  One of the aspects of NASA’s record the paper addressed is the implications of the way the record is constructed and presented, and why it is misleading.

“In order to obscure the fact that the global means are small residues of large numbers whose precision is questionable, the common presentations plot the global mean anomalies without the scattered points and expand the scale so as to make the changes look large,” the paper noted (page 9). This is precisely what OWD has done.  If you open OWD’s page for ‘Global warming: monthly temperature anomaly’ you will see that the default graph, without scatter points, begins in 1880.

Despite their trickery, the global climate change narrative begins to fall apart using their own graphical representations.  In the slide view below are three graphs taken from OWD but with a reduced time frame to only show data from the last ten years, from 15 April 2014 to 15 April 2023.  The first shows the global monthly change in temperatures, the second is filtered for the southern hemisphere only and the third for the northern hemisphere. 

What these graphs appear to show is that the northern hemisphere is cooling while the southern hemisphere is warming.  In other words, the hemisphere where the largest Western nations that are committing “emissions crimes” are located is cooling. 

That the northern hemisphere is cooling is supported by the latest scientific studies which show Europe’s temperature will drop slightly over the next 15-20 years. This change in Europe’s climate is due to a weakening of the North Atlantic Oscillation and a cooling of the North Atlantic.  It has nothing to do with covid shutdowns “reducing emissions” or any other human interventions/causes climate alarmists may claim.  The cooling of Europe, climate alarmists say, will put global warming on pause.

Considering their data shows shows inconsistent temperature trends across hemispheres, perhaps NASA and OWD will need to have interactive titles on their images and graphs that switch from “global warming” to “global cooling” depending on where in the world the data relates. This is, of course, one of the advantages of using neither of those terms and, instead, using the catch-all phrase “climate change.”