USA Today Joins in the Climate ‘Fact-Checking’ of the Daily Sceptic

USA Today is the latest ‘fact checker’ trying to cast doubt on our claim in a recent article that data from weather balloons, along with the satellite record, show the rate of global warming has slowed over the last 20 years. The newspaper’s main source for saying our contention was “false” is a climate researcher who claims the rate of warming in this period is “much faster” than between 1980-2000. The researcher, Zeke Hausfather from Berkeley Earth, is at the forefront of alarmist climate claims. In 2020, he published a paper with NASA’s Senior Climate Adviser Gavin Schmidt, claiming that climate models published over the last five decades “were generally quite accurate in predicting global warming”.

As I shall shortly show, USA Today‘s fact-checking of climate stories calls to mind Dr. Johnson’s dog walking on hind legs – it is not done well, but you are surprised to see it done at all.

This is the second time that our article on the data supplied by the meteorology balloons has been ‘fact checked’. The first appeared in Climate Feedback and featured remarks from Gavin Schmidt. Regular readers might find the next couple of paragraphs familiar and prefer to skip them.

My article was published on May 19th under the heading: “New evidence shows global warming has slowed dramatically over last 20 years.” I reported that in a major re-evaluation of 40 years of telemetric data from meteorology balloons rising through the troposphere, scientists confirmed that temperatures had mostly paused since around 1998. I linked to the original research, and published the following graphs, so that readers could take a view on my statement.