So, how can non-experts be expected to get a grip with climate change and its causes when the experts can't even agree amongst themselves?

I start this musing by stressing I try to remain impartial on the matter of human induced climate change. My view is that humanity is probably contributing, not insignificantly, to the current warming of the planet. However, dramatic claims and data manipulation (I do not question the actual data) leads to a non-expert audience becoming confused and desensitised to the importance of the story. Those of us old who are longer in the tooth have now lived with the dramatic climate claims for over 20-years. It's become a noisy background to our lives and scientists do nothing to bring this noise to the fore.

It matters not how much the UK Met Office bang their chests and claim that humans are the main contributing factor to global warming when their colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic state a different case. Shouting louder won't convince the non-expert of your case.

Here's NOAA's temperature map showing world temperature compared with average during 2016. Both in the UK and USA it is agreed that 2016 was very warm. The UK Met Office say it was one of the two warmest years since 1850 (with 2015 being the other warm year), NOAA say it was the warmest year since their records began 137-years ago.

However, it's the claimed cause of the warming which creates such confusion.

I've written previously here about the strong El Nino event that occurred in late-2015/early-2016. The UK Met Office state that “A particularly strong El Niño event contributed about 0.2C to the annual average for 2016, which was about 1.1C above the long term average from 1850 to 1900. However, the main contributor to warming over the last 150 years is human influence on climate from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

That's a heck of a claim, and I haven't yet found peer reviewed papers to back it up; but I admit I may be wrong and just haven't found them.

Now, all is clear cut. Right? Wrong!

Here's what NOAA say "The global temperatures in 2016 were majorly influenced by strong El Niño conditions that prevailed at the beginning of the year."

Well, that's a different story. The 0.2C warming of 1.1C attributed by the UK Met Office is certainly not "majorly influenced".

Oh, and what's that 1.1C figure all about? Well the UK Met Office say global temperatures in 2016 were 0.77C above the average, NOAA claim they were 0.94C above average. The UK Met Office then rather flippantly state that the differences between these estimates are "...differences between the various estimates arise largely from the way that the data-sparse polar regions are handled". That's a 0.17C difference between the data, trust me that is a big deal!

Back to this 1.1C figure. The UK Met Office base the 0.77C figure on averages over the 1961 to 1990 based period. This is actually a rather good measure as it encompasses both cold and warm years. But then for some reason they attempt to make the story more dramatic by comparing back to what they claim to the the "pre-industrial period" of 1850-1990. that then gives a figure of 1.1C above the average for 2016 temperatures. However,  introducing these periods just makes a nonsense of the data an introduces confusion. Why not choose the little ice-age period instead? It's as scientifically valid as that was a pre-indurstrial period too.

If scientists want to avoid claims (founded or not) of coming up with data to protect their jobs, secure funding, please political masters etc, they really must get this communication issue sorted out. It's something I have banged on about time and time again. It seems that climate scientists are simply unable to comprehend that presenting such data confuses and already confused audience and plays into the hands of media who are sympathetic to the story. All that happens is that 'believers' and 'skeptics' get each of their suspicions confirmed and positions become even more polarised.

So what should we take from this? Firstly, without messing around with averaging periods and years I would trust the NOAA statistics which say that 2016 was the warmest since their records begin in 1880. If the 0.2C contribution form the strong El Nino is correct then this would rank 2016 as the 4th warmest since 1880.