Meanwhile, Outside...

Let's take our monthly peek at the state of the global climate, shall we?

From the climate scientists at NOAA:

Overall, the combined global land and ocean temperature for March 2018 was 0.83°C (1.49°F) above the 20th century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F) and the fifth highest March temperature departure from average in the 139-year record. This value was also 0.40°C (0.72°F) cooler than the record high set in 2016 and was the smallest temperature departure from average in the last four years. The years 2015–17 are the three warmest Marches on record. March 2018 also marks the 42nd consecutive March and the 399th consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average. March 2018 also had the highest monthly temperature departure from average since July 2017. The March global land and ocean surface temperature has increased 0.08°C (0.14°F) per decade since 1880. That rate is more than double since 1980.

Meanwhile over at another guv'ment cabal of science propagandists - NASA:

March 2018 was +0.89 °C warmer than the average March of the 1951-1980 period. This value is lower than the two hottest years of the record — March 2016 (+1.30 °C) and March 2017 (+1.12 °C) — and is comparable with the years 2002, 2010, and 2015, which cluster tightly around +0.9 °C. The corresponding number for all other years in our 138 years of modern record-keeping is at or below +0.77 °C.

Which should come as a surprise to the newly installed head of NASA.

Newly installed? What on Earth do you mean, Dayvoe?

Take a look:

The following are statements from Rep. Jim Bridenstine and acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot on Thursday’s U.S. Senate confirmation of Bridenstine as the 13th Administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration:

"It is an honor to be confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as NASA Administrator,” said Bridenstine. “I am humbled by this opportunity, and I once again thank President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for their confidence. I look forward to working with the outstanding team at NASA to achieve the President’s vision for American leadership in space.”

“I’m very pleased to welcome Jim Bridenstine to NASA,” said Lightfoot. "He joins our great agency at a time when we are poised to accomplish historic milestones across the full spectrum of our work. Jim now takes the reins of this agency and its talented and dedicated workforce. I'm looking forward to him building on our great momentum and sharing our many strengths to help us make the next giants leaps on behalf of humanity. I also want to express my heartfelt appreciation to the NASA team for all they accomplished during my time leading the agency."

You can read Bridenstine's bio here.

You'll note a complete lack of any sort of scientific degree. He has undergraduate degrees in Economics, Psychology, Business and an MBA from Cornell.

Imagine that. The head of a scientific organization having no actual science degrees in his education.

But wait, there's more.

On June 11, 2013 the then-Representative from Oklahoma and now current head of NASA said this:

Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago. Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles.

During the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D.—long before cars, power plants, or the Industrial Revolution—temperatures were warmer than today. During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1900 A.D., temperatures were cooler. Neither of these periods were caused by any human activity.

 None of which is actually scientifically true.  Let's take them one at a time.

He's speaking in 2013 - so if "global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago" that would mean they peaked about 2003. Usually the climate deniers are counting back to 1998 (a strong el Nino year) perhaps Bridenstine made (another) mistake by only canting back to 2003.

In any event, what he said about how "global temperatures stopped rising" is simply not true. Even according to NASA at the time:

Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) say 2012 was the ninth warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. The ten warmest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998. The last year that was cooler than average was 1976.

They even have a chart:

And and explanation:

The line plot above shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2011 as recorded by NASA GISS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom. All four institutions tally temperature data from stations around the world and make independent judgments about whether the year was warm or cool compared to other years. Though there are minor variations from year to year, all four records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the last decade as the warmest.

Then there's the part about how the "Medieval Warm Period" was warmer today. Also not true.

From the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience in 2013:

Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years. [Emphases added.]

But yes, the period between 1300 and 1900 was colder than it is today. But that's because the planet's warming up due to human intervention. So Bridenstine's last sentence is also not true.

This is the guy who'll be heading NASA.

Meanwhile it's still getting warmer outside. The science says so.