IN THIS ISSUE – “Selling You Snake Oil”
POLITICS & TAXES
- Governor’s Race Gets Heated
- Are Golden Geese An Endangered Species? Exodus of High-Earners Worries Governor
- California’s Tax/Benefit Ratio Examined
WATER & CLIMATE
- Water Storage Projects Must Increase Public Benefits for Prop. 1 Grants
- Delta Tunnels Project Moves Closer to Delta Tunnel Project
- NASA Says 2017 Was Near-Record Hot
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING JAN. 19, 2018, READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!
“Selling You Snake Oil”: Governor’s Race Gets Heated
A raucous, catcalling audience and volley of sharp political attacks enlivened the first major debate in California’s 2018 governor’s race Saturday, with front-runner Gavin Newsom taking the brunt of the blows from the candidates on stage.
Most of Newsom’s rivals tried at the event to chip away his dominant lead in the polls and money race as the contest, which has been sleepy for the last year, grows more visible and confrontational. The face-off took place at the Empowerment Congress Summit, an annual gathering held at USC.
Newsom, the lieutenant governor and former mayor of San Francisco, kept a steely smile throughout most of the morning debate. He largely stayed out of the fray and on message, even after he was accused of being inconsistent and unrealistic on single-payer healthcare, and too cozy with teachers’ unions.
The sharpest exchange came from rival Democrat and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who ridiculed Newsom for supporting a state-sponsored universal healthcare system last year without identifying a way to pay for it. The proposal was shelved in the Legislature because of a cost estimated to be as high as $400 billion.
“Anyone who’s telling you that we should do it without a plan is selling you snake oil,” Villaraigosa said.
State Treasurer John Chiang, who like Villaraigosa said he supports the concept of single-payer healthcare but said it was financially out of reach, accused Newsom of changing his position on the issue depending on the audience he was in front of.
Newsom responded by saying that bold change is needed because the current, ineffective healthcare system is driving California into bankruptcy, and that the state needs a governor who is not afraid to act. It was one of the only times Newsom shot back at Villaraigosa.
“Antonio just mentioned that he’s on Medicare. Isn’t that interesting. A single-payer plan in this country … that brings down costs,” said Newsom, who dominates the fundraising race with more than $15 million raised to date, in part because he entered the contest three years ago — far before any of the other candidates.
The debate also grew increasingly chippy between the two Republicans on stage, Huntington Beach Assemblyman Travis Allen and Rancho Santa Fe businessman John Cox, with the biggest clash over which one of the two has played a bigger role in GOP-led efforts to repeal a newly approved gas tax.
The barbed exchanges between the candidates was often interrupted by applause, loud groans and cascades of boos from the at-capacity crowd inside USC’s Bovard Auditorium. The event was hosted by the Empowerment Congress, a nonprofit civil rights organization in Los Angeles.
With six candidates on stage and only 90 minutes to carve out their political positions, the debate served as a display of each candidate’s style, demeanor and political reflexes rather than a showing of their depth of knowledge on the issues facing California.
The moderators, KABC-TV news anchor Marc Brown and KPCC-FM public radio senior political reporter Mary Plummer, tried without success to quiet down the energized audience. They also admonished the candidates for interrupting one another and going over their time.
The only candidate to avoid conflict was Democrat Delaine Eastin, a former state schools chief, who received a warm response when she expressed strong support for universal preschool in California.
Eastin drew loud applause when expressing her support for immigrants.
“My father was born in Kentucky. Nobody loved California more than he did,” Eastin said. “He used to say, ‘Californians are people who are from somewhere else and came to their senses’.”
Education was another flashpoint, with several candidates quickly turning to attack Newsom for his record on the issue.
After Cox blasted Newsom’s endorsement by the California Teachers Assn. as an example of special-interest money controlling politicians, Newsom responded that he was proud of the endorsement.
“I’m committed to public education. I’m committed to increasing funding in our public school system,” Newsom said, pointing to his track record on education while he was mayor of San Francisco.
“San Francisco was the top-performing urban school district in the state of California. We were hardly perfect; we had stubborn achievement gap issues,” he said, adding that the city invested in arts education, placed wellness centers in schools and created college savings accounts for every kindergarten student.
Villaraigosa and Chiang both objected, pointing to uneven performance among different groups of students.
“I don’t think we can gloss over the fact that San Francisco County is the worst county for African American students in this state,” Villaraigosa said. “You can’t just say we have a little bit of an achievement gap. We actually have a real achievement gap, and if this state is going to be a golden state and it’s going to do what we should do to grow together, we’ve got to invest in every one of us.”
Chiang added that Latino and Pacific Islander students also faced a greater performance disparity in San Francisco than in other areas.
“We’re talking about a very select group that may have high achievement that accounts for San Francisco, but when you’re talking about the future of the state of California, they’re being left behind,” he said.
As expected, Democrats and Republicans divided along party lines on many of the other issues they were quizzed about, splitting over the new gas tax, climate change and President Trump’s immigration policies.
The Democrats ripped into Trump for asking participants in an Oval Office meeting Thursday why the United States should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
Cox sidestepped Trump’s slur, dismissing the controversy as distraction from the real issues facing California. Allen used it as an opportunity to voice his support for Trump’s immigration crackdown, including the president’s push to build a massive border wall. He was roundly booed by the audience.
Cox, who also said he supports the border wall, caught an earful when he tried to explain why he thinks legal immigrants are crucial to California’s financial well-being.
“We also need a wealth of people who can contribute to the American dream, who can pick the fruits and vegetables that make California No. 1” in agriculture, Cox said to loud groans from the crowd.
He used his next opportunity to say he recognized immigrants contributed to all aspects of society.
The biggest clash between the two Republicans was a snippy back-and-forth over the effort to repeal the gas tax.
Allen started gathering signatures in May to place a measure on the ballot, but Cox didn’t get involved in a competing effort until October. Allen’s effort failed Friday to qualify for the ballot, and he joined the effort that Cox is part of.
After Allen urged the audience to sign a petition to put the matter before voters, Cox replied: “Travis, welcome to the fight on getting rid of the gas tax. Glad to have you on board — finally.”
Allen pointed out that his call to repeal the gas tax predates Cox’s.
“It’s funny, John, that was my fight from the beginning, so you’re welcome,” Allen said, later adding, “I’d like to say thank you very much to John Cox for writing a $250,000 check to buy his way into the repeal-the-gas-tax [ballot measure committee].”
Newsom has led all recent polls and has a vast advantage in campaign money raised, both of which make him the favorite to finish first in the June 5 primary.
The race is likely to boil down to a battle for second place — and in California, that’s good enough. Under the state’s top-two primary rules, the two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary win a ticket to the November general election, regardless of their party affiliation.
According to a November USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, Newsom led the pack with 31% of California’s registered voters, followed by Villaraigosa with 21%.
Among the other Democrats, Chiang came in with 11% and Eastin registered at 4%. Allen led among the major Republicans with 15% and Cox was favored by 11%.
Former GOP congressman Doug Ose, who entered the race just over a week ago and did not receive an invitation to the town hall, was not included in the poll.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-governor-debate-20180113-story.html
Are Golden Geese An Endangered Species? Exodus of High-Earners Worries Governor
To intertwine cliches, Gov. Jerry Brown let the cat out of the bag last week and acknowledged that he’s concerned about killing the golden geese.
Those geese are the few thousand Californians with the highest incomes whose taxes allow Brown and other California politicians to spend tens of billions of dollars a year and the new federal tax overhaul encourages them to take their money elsewhere.
When President Trump and the Republican Congress were working on what they called tax reform, Brown and governors of other high-tax states, such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo, complained loudly that it was unfair to their constituents.
However, they never admitted the obvious, that their concern was really about its impact on high-income taxpayers who would no longer be able to deduct more than a tiny fraction of their state and local taxes on their federal tax returns.
In fact, while the federal tax legislation can be criticized on many grounds, it really will benefit most low- and moderate-income taxpayers by increasing their standard deduction to $24,000 on joint returns.
High-income taxpayers in most states also will benefit from lower marginal rates. But in California and other states with high tax burdens, the opposite will be true. With a $10,000 limit on local and state tax deductions, wealthy Californians, New Yorkers and residents of the other high-tax states will see their federal tax bills zoom upwards.
In other words, they will feel the full impact of their state and local taxes, which will no longer be subsidized by the federal government and the impact will be the heaviest in California because of its highest-in-the-nation income tax rates.
“People with higher incomes pay a lot more money, and some of them may be tempted to leave,” Brown said as he introduced his 2018-19 budget, calling it “an assault by the Republicans in Congress against California, New York and New Jersey.”
Brown’s budget underscores his concern about a potential flight of golden geese.
“The highest-income Californians pay a large share of the state’s personal income tax,” it says. “For the 2015 tax year, the top 1 percent of income earners paid just under 48 percent of personal income taxes. This percentage has been greater than 40 percent in 11 of the past 12 years.
“The share of total adjusted gross income from the top 1 percent of income earners has increased from 13.8 percent in 1993 to 24 percent in 2014 (and) changes in the income of a relatively small group of taxpayers can have a significant impact on state revenues.”
There’s more than a small tinge of irony about the situation.
When Brown proposed to temporarily raise income taxes on those in the highest brackets to close a budget gap, one of the arguments was that they wouldn’t feel the pain because they could deduct the new taxes on their federal returns.
That also was the argument two years ago when a union-led coalition successfully urged voters to extend the higher rates for 12 additional years. That rationale for taxing the rich has now vanished and the full weight of those taxes will be felt.
Some Californians have already made the switch, moving their official residences to states with low or no state income taxes, such as neighboring Nevada, and others will certainly follow.
As he closed his budget presentation, Brown more less breathed a sigh of relief that the impact of those moves, plus any recession, will hit after he’s departed from the Capitol a year hence and be a problem for the next governor.
California’s Tax/Benefit Ratio Examined
California was the birthplace of the 1970s tax revolt, but its residents still pay more in state and local taxes than those in most other big urban states. And many are asking why as they assess how a new federal income tax law that caps state and local tax deductions will shake out for them.
“We have relatives in Missouri, and when we travel there we wonder why it costs so much more here,” said Bob Jackson, 66, a retired postal worker who lives in San Jose.
Of the five most populous U.S. states — California, Texas, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania — only New York collects more state and local taxes per resident than the Golden State, according to The Tax Foundation, an independent Washington, D.C., tax policy nonprofit.
Like California, Texas and Florida are big coastal states with miles of beaches, large, diverse, multilingual populations and all the urban complexities that come with hosting some of the country’s biggest cities. Yet they have more public school teachers per pupil and higher test scores, they have more cops per crime, more firefighters per resident and more criminals behind bars.
As the federal tax overhaul puts a spotlight on high-tax states like California, which just unveiled a new $131.7 billion budget proposal with a $6.1 billion surplus tabbed for rainy-day reserves, it has renewed debate over whether Californians pay too much for their government.
Jackson, whose wife is a schoolteacher, said that even with the sales and income tax hike Gov. Jerry Brown championed in 2012 for education, state schools are “suffering” and “funding is not what it should be.”
“I guess I get annoyed when they keep trying to raise taxes and don’t make any improvements,” Jackson said.
Others, like Castro Valley lawyer John Hansen, 80, say Californians may pay more but get more in return, like freeways instead of turnpike tolls.
“You have to pay for what you get, and we probably get more here in a broad sense than citizens in Texas or Florida,” Hansen said.
But do we?
A dive into the numbers, such as a What Drives State Spending report published last year by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit policy research organization, offers some clues.
In K-12 education, the Golden State’s top spending priority, the analysis showed California spending per resident on K-12 schools was about average among the states, but while teacher pay was among the highest, the state trailed others in teachers and support staff per student.
The Urban Institute analysis is based on 2012 figures, before the the state’s sales and income tax hike kicked in. H.D. Palmer, state Department of Finance deputy director for external affairs, noted state education funding hit a trough that year from the last economic downturn, but has since grown significantly — 66 percent — with the help of voter-approved sales and income tax hikes. Voters extended the income tax on the wealthy in 2016.
Still, the National Center for Education Statisticstells a similar staffing story using more recent figures and also shows California’s math, reading, writing and science scores are below average.
In higher education, the Urban Institute ranked California among the biggest spenders per resident, but also showed the state had among the fewest professors and other staff per student, even though they were the highest paid.
California was among the highest spenders per resident nationwide on police and firefighting, with the highest paid cops and firefighters in the country, but the state has fewer cops per crime and firefighters per resident than most states, the Urban Institute analysis showed. California also was among the top in spending on prisons and correctional staff.
But while correctional staffing was high, 2015 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics figures crunched by the Sentencing Project found California has fewer prison inmates per resident than Texas, Florida and many other states.
Even with its miles of freeways, California highway spending was average among the states, though public transit spending was among the highest, the Urban Institute showed. Palmer said the state aims to boost spending on highways with the new gas tax the Legislature passed last year.
And although California has generous eligibility requirements for Medicaid, spending on the health program for the poor and payments to enrollees were average, the Urban Institute showed. California is among the country’s biggest spenders on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare program. But with generous eligibility, payments are spread among a broader group, and are among the lowest per recipient.
“You can have a program that’s more generous but you’re spreading benefits more thinly among those recipients,” said Tracy Gordon, a senior Urban Institute fellow and co-author of the analysis. “If you want to be generous on both fronts you need a bigger pot of money.”
To California taxpayer advocates like Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, findings like the Urban Institute analysis aren’t surprising. He argues Californians overpay for public services and blames the power the state grants to public employee unions.
“The number one driver of costs is employment costs,” Coupal said, arguing government union contracts “have given public employees Cadillac pension plans and those costs are eating into the general fund of state and local governments.” Unions are fighting in court against some of Gov. Brown’s efforts to trim those perks.
Coupal added that even the benefits of the California property tax limits his organization fought for in the 1970s and 1990s, and which many liberal leaders want to loosen, are being offset by the state’s high housing prices. Coupal blames those housing costs, which help drive California public employee pay, on regulations that slow home building.
In the past, Californians caught a break on their state’s high taxes because they could be deducted in calculating federal income tax. But the tax overhaul President Donald Trump signed last month limits those deductions to $10,000.
Will that turn Californians against the tax-friendly leaders they elected?
Anthony Reyes, a spokesman for state Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León, a Democrat challenging Dianne Feinstein for her U.S. Senate seat, said most Californians consider the state’s taxes a fair price for paradise.
“Slightly higher than average taxes, far stronger economy, best public university system in the world, record low uninsured rate, strongest clean air and environmental protections in the nation, and we consistently lead the nation in job creation,” said Reyes.
And Palmer argues most Californians agree: Voters overwhelmingly approved sales and income tax hikes in 2012 and 2016 to fund schools and other public programs.
“That issue has been asked and answered in two ballot measures by the people of California,” Palmer said.
But Coupal, whose group is backing an effort to repeal the new gas tax, thinks voters may be ready for another revolt.
“We have the highest income tax rate, the highest state sales tax, the highest gasoline tax, one of the highest car taxes, and we’re getting very little for our dollar — just drive down the highway,” Coupal said. “I think people are starting to get fed up with that.”
Water Storage Projects Must Increase Public Benefits for Prop. 1 Grants
Signaling trouble for nearly a dozen landmark water storage projects to help California cope with its next drought, state water officials on Thursday announced none of the proposals — including raising Contra Costa County’s Los Vaqueros Dam and building a new Santa Clara County dam near Pacheco Pass — provide the public benefits that their supporters claim, potentially putting their state funding at risk.
The announcement sent waves of anxiety and concern through California’s water world, and could be a major stumbling block in the efforts to expand the state’s water supply.
Three years ago, during the depths of California’s historic drought, state voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion bond measure to pay for new water projects, including building more dams and reservoirs.
Hoping to get some of that money, water districts drew up plans and submitted lengthy applications for 11 projects, including two in the Bay Area and a massive new $5.1 billion lake in Colusa County known as Sites Reservoir.
But on Thursday, the staff of the California Water Commission, which must decide by July which water storage projects will receive bond money, raised major concerns. They announced that nearly half of the projects have no public benefits that meet the ballot measure’s rules for getting money, and the rest fall significantly short of providing as much benefit to the public as they would cost.
Joe Yun, executive officer of the commission, whose nine-member board is appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, said at a meeting in Sacramento that his agency will provide more details to the public on Feb. 2, and that the projects’ supporters will have three weeks to appeal. The scores could change after those appeals come in, he said, which would affect how much money, if any, is approved for each project.
“We are not kicking folks out,” he said. “This is an expression of additional information that needs to come.”
But dam supporters were shaken. If the low scores by the commission’s staff hold up through its appeals process in the next few months, many of the dam and reservoir projects are likely to get no state money from Proposition 1 or in some cases, less than they have budgeted, reducing their chances of ever getting built.
“We were shocked,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, a coalition of 430 public water agencies across the state.
“I think the voters would be concerned that staff working for the state government are clearly raising huge hurdles toward moving these projects forward,” Quinn said.
State Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Yuba City, said the state is risking losing its best opportunity in 50 years to build new reservoirs.
“The public should be concerned. They voted for large new dams and reservoirs,” Nielsen said. “I think this is an effort to undermine the intent of the voters. It looks like the staff is setting the bar so high that nobody can reach it. The citizens of California need to know what’s happening. I can’t say how important this is.”
Both the California Democratic and Republican parties, along with Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Dianne Feinstein and then-Sen. Barbara Boxer, endorsed Proposition 1, which passed with a landslide 65-35 percent vote in November 2014. Major unions, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and the California Chamber of Commerce endorsed it, as did the California Farm Bureau Federation and numerous environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy, Audubon California and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The measure provided money for new water treatment plants, water recycling projects, flood control projects and wetlands restoration. Some of that already has been spent by other agencies on those projects. The measure also provided $2.7 billion for new water storage, which is defined as dams, reservoirs and groundwater storage.
But unlike with other water bonds in the past, Democrats in the Legislature who put it on the ballot insisted that none of the measure’s money for dams could pay for increased water storage, only other benefits, particularly environmental ones. The fine print of the ballot measure also says that the bond money can pay no more than half of any project’s total cost, with local water agencies or the federal government paying the rest.
And most important, it requires that every storage project must be ranked by the California Water Commission with a scoring system that takes into account “public benefits.” Those benefits are defined not as how much water a reservoir can hold, but rather, how much it improves recreation, like boating or hiking, flood control and environmental conditions, such as helping endangered salmon populations come back by providing cold water to streams during dry periods.
Some environmental groups say those rules make sense.
“If the state is going to put up taxpayer money for a project, it is appropriate that there be broad public benefit rather than just subsidizing private interests or agencies who have other means of getting the funding from local ratepayers,” said Kyle Jones, a policy advocate with Sierra Club California. “It’s not fair for people in Redding to subsidize a dam in Los Angeles unless the whole state is benefiting.”
The commission wrote rules to calculate a “public benefit ratio” that would account for 33 percent of the overall score of each project, with the rest coming from categories like how feasible it is to construct or how resilient it will be as the climate changes. For example, supporters of an $800 million project asking the state for $400 million must show that their project would provide $400 million in new public benefits, like improved salmon runs, flood control or recreation. If they don’t hit that 1-to-1 ratio, they are less likely to receive the money. Further, half of all the money the state gives must be for “ecosystem improvements,” the ballot measure said.
In recent weeks, although all the projects claimed ratios of $2 in public benefits for every $1 in state money, or even as high as $6-to-$1, staff members at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, State Water Resources Control Board and Department of Water Resources have reduced or rejected those economic claims as inflated. After the detailed scores are made public by the commission on Feb. 2, the agencies will have until Feb. 23 to change their projects as part of their appeals to increase the chance of getting funded.
“We’re not paying for water. We’re paying for public benefits,” said Chris Orrock, a spokesman for the California Water Commission. “As defined in Prop 1, water is not one of those benefits that we are funding. We’ve been very clear at every step.”
Delta Tunnels Project Moves Closer to Delta Tunnel Project
California officials have moved closer to scaling back the troubled Delta tunnels project, officially notifying potential construction contractors that they’re considering limiting the project to one tunnel.
In a memo to engineering firms and other contract bidders last Friday, the Department of Water Resources said it is considering building the tunnels project in phases, with the first phase consisting of “one main tunnel instead of two.”
Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration has been floating the idea of a downsized tunnels proposal since October, when funding problems became increasingly evident. Major farm irrigator Westlands Water District refused to help pay for the $17.1 billion project, and the Santa Clara Valley Water District said it would only consider participating in a one-tunnel plan.
Brown’s administration was hoping for a “yes” vote from Santa Clara because it’s a major Northern California agency that serves 1.9 million customers in Silicon Valley. Most of the agencies that would pull water from the tunnels, and would pay for construction, are in the San Joaquin Valley and urban Southern California.
All told, the project, known officially as California WaterFix, is probably about $6 billion short of being fully funded. The only water agencies that have agreed to pay for WaterFix are members of the State Water Project. Not a single member of the federal Central Valley Project has joined in.
Tunnels advocates said they believe DWR is getting closer to making a definitive decision to convert WaterFix to a one-tunnel project. “Decisions are going to be made at the end of this month, first part of February on how we’re going to have to move forward with the project,” said deputy general manager Roger Patterson of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, one of the major backers of WaterFix.
Scientists say decades of pumping Northern California’s water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to south state agencies has significantly contributed to the decline in the estuary’s fragile ecosystem.
To protect species of nearly extinct fish, pumping often gets throttled back, allowing water that would otherwise be pumped to wash out to the ocean. The Brown administration says that by rerouting how water flows to the massive pumps through the tunnels, the tunnels project would protect fish and enable pumping to proceed more reliably.
Many environmentalists, Delta farmers and others say the WaterFix project would bring even more harm to the Delta – and they aren’t mollified with a one-tunnel approach.
Opponents also say the single-tunnel project is fundamentally different than what was originally proposed, and would require a fresh set of environmental review and other regulatory permits, which could mean months of costly delays. That would include a reboot of marathon water-rights hearings currently underway at the State Water Resources Control Board, which oversees the California’s system of water rights.
“It’s a substantial change. It cuts the project in half,” said Assemblyman Jim Frazier, D-Discovery Bay. “You don’t know what … havoc this project will create. Everything is an assumption of what they’re doing here.”
But tunnels advocates say scaling back to a single tunnel shouldn’t require further study because a single-tunnel approach was explored in environmental reviews that have been approved by state and federal regulators.
The water board has been holding hearings on the tunnels since 2016, and they’re slated to resume on Thursday. Water board spokesman Tim Moran said board members are well aware that Brown’s office has been in talks with water contractors about downsizing the project, but until they hear from Brown that a change has been decided, they’ll continue forging ahead as if it’s still two tunnels.
NASA Says 2017 Was Near-Record Hot
Wall Street Journal, 1/18/18
Global temperatures simmered at near-record levels in 2017, even as the world cooled slightly with the waning of a powerful El Nino event that had driven recent warming to levels unprecedented in modern times, federal climate experts said Thursday.
In an annual report, scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which independently track the rise and fall of world temperatures for the federal government, ranked last year as among the three warmest since systematic record-keeping began in 1880.
NASA researchers ranked 2017 as the second-warmest year since 1880, while NOAA scientists ranked it as the third-warmest. Both analyses show that the five warmest years on record all occurred since 2010.
“Despite colder-than-average temperatures in any one part of the world, temperatures over the planet as a whole continue the rapid warming trend we’ve seen over the last 40 years,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which conducted the space agency’s analysis.
By NASA’s calculation, globally averaged temperatures in 2017 were 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, second only to global temperatures in 2016. In the NOAA analysis, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.51°F (0.84°C) above the 20th-century norm.
The agency teams essentially cross-check other’s findings, using different collections of readings from thousands of weather stations and different mathematical methods.
Their calculations are in line with other independent assessments of the year’s global warming trend. Preliminary reports by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the World Meteorological Organization, as well satellite-temperature data maintained by researchers at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, all suggest that 2017 was the second- or third-warmest on record.
“There are, of course, year-to-year and decade-to-decade natural fluctuations brought about by variability in the sun, volcanic eruptions and natural oscillations such as El Nino,” said atmosphere scientist Kerry Emanuel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies the effects of climate change on hurricanes. ”But the long-term trend is unmistakable.”
Roger Pielke Sr. at the Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo., said that the basic methodology used in the rankings is “flawed” because it relies solely on surface temperatures and doesn’t take into consideration other measures, such as deep ocean heat, that affect global climate.
John Christy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who tracks global temperatures using high-altitude NASA satellite data, said that in his analysis global temperatures are rising more gradually than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Several climate researchers said that 2017 was notable, even though it didn’t match the record pace of previous years.
“What is particularly interesting about today’s announcement is that 2017 was a top warm year even without the presence of an El Nino which can often give warm years an extra boost,” said J. Marshall Shepherd, Director of University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program.
All told, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. The trend has been driven in large part by land-use changes, including cutting down forests and paving over natural surfaces, and rising emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and methane from livestock production. A study in 2012 by the non-profit Berkeley Earth group led by physicist Richard Muller determined that variations in the sun’s behavior play no detectable role in recent rising temperatures.