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June 23, 2015

Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science | Volume 2 | SCI-NEWS 5

Conservatives hoping to use 2015 as a future starting point for short-term cooling trends in temperature

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This year is shaping up to be the hottest in Earth’s recorded history and conservative politicians and political organizations couldn’t be happier. “It is our great hope that 2015 will succeed 1998 as a future benchmark to infer misleading short-term cooling trends in global temperature,” said Matthew Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU).

For years, conservatives have tried to convince Americans that climate change is a hoax by, among other methods, relying on short-term (~ 10 – 20 years) temperature trends. “We have this fancy graph here,” explained Schlapp, referring to actual satellite data on Earth’s atmospheric temperature (see graph). “And, in the past, we told all the Republican politicians to just draw a line from the top of this peak in 1998 to the present, and, bingo! Instant negative trend in global temperature! Climate change disproven! And it’s great because this is actual data we’re using, and we’re able to use it against the scientists!”

Global temeperature of the Earth since 1979, as measured by satellite. Graph also contains example text and graphics added by the American Conservative Union (ACU) to help teach Americans about the Climate Change hoax. May or may not come with example snowball. Data from Remote Sensing Systems.

But with 2015 poised to become the hottest year ever, some GOP lawmakers were worried that this short-term trend would disappear. “But that’s the beauty of this strategy,” argued Schlapp. “If there’s a hotter year than 1998, we’ll just use that one for all of our future short-term trends. So, it becomes a cycle, just like global temperatures.”

This was welcome news to many conservative politicians, like Texas Senator and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. “This was always a great strategy to convince people not to believe the 98% of scientists who say that climate change is real,” replied Cruz. “Actually, the news of this year likely being the warmest on record matches well with the projections from our own Gullible Climate Misinformation (GCM) models, giving further proof that this strategy is correct.”

Jeb Bush, another presidential hopeful, was more pragmatic. “To be honest, I was wondering how long we’d be able to continue this ruse to fool the American people. I mean, they’d have to catch on eventually, right? But with 2015 projected to be the warmest in centuries, we’ll have many more years of using this strategy to convince American citizens to deny reality.”

Schlapp added that the ACU would soon begin seminars and workshops designed to train conservative politicians to use 2015 instead of 1998 as the new benchmark. “Using actual data to challenge established scientific concepts is really rare for conservatives, and most don’t know what to do with true data. We feel these workshops help tremendously in that regard,” said Schlapp. “We believe that the future is bright, almost blindingly so, for the young stars of the Republican Party. And we want to make sure that our misinformation is at the top of its game.”

Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science (PNIS) by https://instsci.org/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.