Climate Crock–Heat Wave edition
Long-term trends vs cold snaps
Also see the recent misrepresentation of Mojib Latif’s work, this paper and this recent article by James Hansen et al.":
If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?
No we are not cooling, nor are we entering into a mini-ice age!
Here we go again, for another round of misrepresenting Mojib Latif’s work showing a levelling off of temperature followed by rapid warming. This time it was kicked off by the cold spell over parts of Europe and North America. But it is worth noting that the Arctic is much warmer than usual, and it is rather warm here in Vancouver as well, so much so that there are worries about there being a snow shortage for the upcoming Winter Olympics.
Take a look at the above graph, what do you see? Does it look like a cooling trend? Nope, but according to the crack reporters (or is that reporters on crack?) over at the Daily Mail it certainly does show cooling. 30 years of cooling, perhaps even a mini-ice age!
The folly of extrapolating from short term trends
Climate change deniers routinely make the same mistake as the comic above.
Industry ignored its scientists on climate, Denialist scam exposed
Deniers have known all along that they were lying.
Even industry scientists concluded that:
The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied… The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.
And that was from a memo written in 1995!
Of course that isn’t what the industry funded Global Climate Coalition, who’s scientists wrote the above memo, was saying:
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
Unprecedented global warming in past year! Warming 20 times greater than predicted! Oceans to boil any day now!
The rate of warming for the past year is far greater than even the most crazed alarmists predicted. We are all doomed!
From January 2008 to January 2009, the planet warmed a remarkable 0.37°C (see data here). This is 20 times (!) the annual rate of warming in recent decades and 20 times what most climate models have projected we should be experiencing.
Remember last year when denier sites were claiming that the (meaningless) temperature trend between January 2007 and January 2008 ‘wiped out a century of warming‘? Remember how they claimed that this was proof that we were experiencing massive global cooling, and that global warming was a sham? Well now one year later and with an similarly massive (but equally meaningless) drastic increase in temperatures (20 times greater than predicted!) surely we can expect stories from the usual sources on the immanent boiling of the worlds oceans. Maybe I wont hold my breath on this one.
The point is there never was “global cooling,” and it remains absurd that the media or anyone else, including the conservative blogosphere, ever pushed that storyline — especially if they aren’t prepared to write about the “re-accelerated” warming that inevitably follows such “cooling”
The 1998 cherry pick
One of the common threads of most denier rants on recent temperature change is cherry picking 1998 as the start of their analysis. This is a dead giveaway that they either are clueless about basic statistics or are being dishonest. The fact is that 1998 was a highly anomalous year. A strong el Niño effect pushed temperatures to unprecedented levels, and that fact makes it useless as a baseline from which to analyse temperature trends as the fowling graph makes clear.
Global Warming is over! once every decade or so …
Given the recent spade of ‘global warming is over’ articles over the past few months I figured this article by Greenfyre is particularly relevant.
Record cold winter proves global warming is a farce… ha!
As temperature’s plummeted thought much of North America earlier this year climate change denier sites were quick to use this evidence of local weather to somehow prove that climate change is a farce. This is nothing new, it happens every winter and it shows either a deliberate attempt to mislead, or a very deep level of ignorance of the subject.
The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold. The temperature of one place at one time is just weather, and says nothing about climate, much less climate change, much less again global climate change.
Of course recent events have made this point abundantly clear.
