Source

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/04/my-twenty-years-of-watching-the-thermo...

The linked article shows the graphs mentioned

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2026-1-5-why-dont-global-lower-tropo...


The big news in 2025 for the climate scare was that all of a sudden this scare wasn’t such big news any more.  We’re talking here about something that all of the right people had agreed for decades was an “existential” threat to humanity.  It was supposedly the single most important thing that we all needed to focus on and transform our lives to stop.  We only had ten years to “save the planet”; or maybe it was only five.  If we failed, we would shortly be inundated by sea level rise, or maybe devastated by floods and droughts, or burned up by wildfires.  

And then, during 2025, quite rapidly the scaremongering stories became less frequent.  Several prominent priests of the climate cult turned apostate (e.g., Bill Gates, Matthew Yglesias).  The political push for “net zero” dramatically slowed.  Why?  There have undoubtedly been many reasons for the shift.  Among those have been Trump administration regulatory changes and de-funding of scare-promoting bureaucracies and NGOs, plus the emerging extreme costs and ineffectiveness of the “net zero” energy transition.

But here’s another issue that, although I rarely see it mentioned, could play a big role in the ongoing eclipse of the climate cult:  The failure of global tropospheric temperatures to closely track the rise in atmospheric CO2.

The asserted basis for the climate scare is the proposition that greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, primarily CO2 from the burning of hydrocarbon fuels, cause the atmosphere to warm.  The hypothesis is that atmospheric temperatures are essentially stable in the absence of human influences, and that human-produced GHGs are introducing a forcing mechanism that causes atmospheric heat to track rising GHG levels, leading to higher and higher temperatures.

As our frequent and curmudgeonly commenter Richard Greene points out, you will be hard pressed to find any legitimate climate scientists to dispute the proposition that CO2 and some other human-produced gases (e.g., methane) are GHGs whose accumulation in the atmosphere is likely to lead to at least some warming.  But, assuming that you accept that proposition, the question remains:  Will the resulting warming be large, or moderate, or small?  Indeed, could the GHG-induced warming be so small as to be even near or below the limit of detectability by available instruments?  Could observed changes in temperatures be principally caused by other factors?  And how could you assess those questions?

I suggest that the right way to assess the question is to look at the best available evidence.  In other words, try using the Scientific Method!  For these purposes, I propose as the best available evidence the record of global average lower tropospheric temperatures from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (based on NASA satellite readings); and the record of atmospheric CO2 levels from the NOAA observatory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.  It so happens that both of those records have just been updated through December 2025.  Here are screenshots of the graphs from the two websites.  First, here is the UAH global temperature record since 1979:

And here is the atmospheric CO2 record from NOAA since 1958:

A few things leap off the graphs.  The CO2 trend has a small annual seasonality (associated with plant growth in the Northern Hemisphere, which has much more land area than the Southern); but aside from that, the trend is smoothly upward, with even a small amount of acceleration.

The trend of temperatures, on the other hand, is anything but smoothly upward.  If you look at the UAH graph holistically, you will undoubtedly perceive an overall rising trend of temperatures as the years progress.  But unlike the CO2 graph, the temperature graph is punctuated by periodic and significant reversals, where temperatures decline quite rapidly, and by amounts that are very large in relation to the overall rise.

Consider just the most recent 22 months, from April 2024 to December 2025.  The UAH temperature anomaly has declined from +0.94 deg C to +0.30 deg C over that period, a decline of 0.64 deg C.  The entire temperature rise in the UAH record from its inception in 1979 to its all-time record in April 2024 was from -0.47 deg C to +0.94 deg C, or 1.41 deg C.  The recent 0.64 deg C decline represents almost half of that.  

And yet even as world temperatures were giving back almost half of their increase over the past 46 years, the CO2 level continued its slow and steady rise, going from about 421 ppm to 427 ppm over those 22 months, according to the NOAA graph.

If you look at the NOAA graphs of the other GHGs, you will see that they follow a rising trend similar to the trend of CO2.

So, if CO2 and the other GHGs are the main factor in determining changes in atmospheric temperatures, why have the temperatures gone down for almost two years now while the GHGs have continued their rise?

I’m not saying that I know the answer to that question.  I am saying that the know-it-alls who claim that the GHGs are the control knob for average atmospheric temperatures don’t know either.

Clearly, there are factors at play other than the GHGs, and the impact of those factors is not small relative to the impact of the GHGs.  Whatever those factors are, they are capable of driving global average temperatures down by at least 0.64 deg C even as the concentration of GHGs continues to go up.  In fact, they are capable of driving temperatures down even much more than that.  

If you look at the other parts of the UAH temperature graph, you will see that this phenomenon of rapidly declining temperatures, as in the past 22 months, has also occurred repeatedly over the 46 year period of the satellite temperature record, all while the GHGs were continuously rising.  Among the larger declines in the satellite temperature record were one of about 0.80 deg C from early 1988 to early 1989; one of more than a full 1 deg C from early 1998 to early 2000; one of about 0.80 deg C from early 2010 to early 2012; and one of more than 0.70 deg C from early 2016 to early 2018.

Something that was not GHGs drove temperatures down repeatedly by amounts ranging from 0.70 deg C to over a full 1 deg C over the past 46 years.  And now that you know that, how exactly do you know that the increases in temperatures that have occurred over these years were not also caused in part or mostly, or even entirely, by these same unidentified forces?  And if these forces are capable of driving temperatures down by more than 1 deg C, how exactly do we know that the current decline is not going to continue until temperatures have gone below the place where they started at about -0.47 deg C back in 1979?  And if the temperatures do not go back to -0.47 deg C in the current round of decline, how do we know that they won’t go below that level in the next decline, or the one after?

There are obviously many hypotheses as to factors in play other than the GHGs.  Some of those include:  variations in solar irradiation; volcanic activity; atmospheric aerosols; level of cloudiness; and various oscillations in ocean temperatures.  That list is by no means comprehensive.  It may well be that there are other factors as yet unidentified.  Moreover, I haven’t seen anyone who has put together a set of proposed factors that when combined can reproduce a pattern comparable to the satellite temperature record.  You can call the unknown factors “noise,” but the “noise” may be as significant as all the other factors put together.

But the hypothesis that the GHGs are the main factor, the effective “control knob” of global temperatures?  That looks to me to be falsified by the satellite temperature record.  If commenters can explain why that is not the case, I’m very interested to hear why.

Why did the dinosaurs die out?
(and 75% of other species on this spaceship)

Was it the numerous, theory's, and evolution.
       Or was it Man and Cars ?
Coupled with  Al Gore's """claims"""


"... (252.2 million to 66 million years ago) from which dinosaurs are known, there were constant changes in dinosaur communities. Different species evolved rapidly and were quickly replaced by others throughout the Mesozoic; it is rare that any particular type of dinosaur survived from one geologic formation into the next. The fossil evidence shows a moderately rich fauna of plateosaurs and other prosauropods, primitive ornithopods, and theropods during the Late Triassic Epoch (237 million to 201.3 million years ago). Most of these kinds of dinosaurs are also represented in strata of the Early Jurassic Epoch (201.3 million to 174.1 million years ago), but following a poorly known Middle Jurassic, the fauna of the Late Jurassic (163.5 million to 145 million years ago) was very different. By this time sauropods, more advanced ornithopods, stegosaurs, and a variety of theropods predominated. The Early Cretaceous (145 million to 100.5 million years ago) then contained a few sauropods (albeit they were all new forms), a few stegosaurian holdovers, new kinds of theropods and ornithopods, and some of the first well-known ankylosaurs. By the Late Cretaceous (100.5 million to 66 million years ago), sauropods, which had disappeared from the northern continents through most of the early and mid-Cretaceous, had reinvaded the northern continents from the south, and advanced ornithopods (duckbills) had become the dominant browsers. A variety of new theropods of all sizes were widespread; stegosaurs no longer existed; and the ankylosaurs were represented by a collection of new forms that were prominent in the North America and Asia. New groups of dinosaurs, the pachycephalosaurs and ceratopsians, had appeared in Asia and had successfully colonized North America. The overall picture is thus quite clear: throughout Mesozoic time there was a continuous dying out and renewal of dinosaurian life. ..."


"... It is important to note that extinction is a normal, universal occurrence. Mass extinctions often come to mind when the term extinction is mentioned, but the normal background extinctions that occur throughout geologic time probably account for most losses of biodiversity. Just as new species constantly split from existing ones, existing species are constantly becoming extinct. The speciation rate of a group must, on balance, exceed the extinction rate in the long run, or that group will become extinct. The history of animal and plant life is replete with successions as early forms are replaced by new and often more advanced forms. In most instances the layered (stratigraphic) nature of the fossil record gives too little information to show whether the old forms were actually displaced by the new successors (from the effects of competition, predation, or other ecological processes) or if the new kinds simply expanded into the declining population’s ecological niches. ..."


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