Readers may recall earlier this week when I pointed out an inconvenient truth, the continental USA has no warming trend for the past decade, in fact it is cooling.
And, going back 15 years, the data is flat. Investors business Daily picked up the story in relation to the BEST controversy:
Don’t Stop Doubting
Posted 06:28 PM ET @ news.investors.com
Climate: Just a few weeks ago, a formerly skeptical scientist made news when he changed his mind about global warming. If he looked at the new data a meteorologist has pulled up, he’d change it back again.
Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, said that data from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project convinced him that “global warming is real.” “We see no evidence,” he said Oct. 21, that global warming has “slowed down.”
The alarmists, of course, leveraged Muller’s statements to suit their agenda.
But Muller’s is not the “consensus” position of the team. Judith Curry, a Georgia Tech climate researcher with more than 30 years experience who was also part of the BEST project, has said “there is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped.” She looked at the same data Muller did and noted it shows global temperatures haven’t increased since the late 1990s.
Now comes meteorologist Anthony Watts armed with data showing the continental U.S. has not warmed in the last 10 years, and in fact has grown cooler in the summer and colder in the winter. The numbers aren’t a collection of weather forecasts from Watts, who runs the website “Watts Up With That,” but data from the National Climatic Data Center.
Granted, the Lower 48 aren’t the entire world, only a small slice of it. But it is a large portion of the developed world, a significant contributor of man-made carbon dioxide emissions and full of “heat islands” — big cities — that should be skewing temperature data upward.
Yet, that’s not what’s happening. The 2001-to-2011 trend shows a cooling of 0.87 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the 1911-2010 average. Backing up the starting date to 1996 doesn’t help the alarmists’ case, either. Temperatures are flat over that period.
Both the falling and flat temperature trends are coming at a time when man is putting out more emissions of carbon dioxide than ever. Given that, it seems to us that the U.S. should be warming.
Unlike Muller, we remain skeptics and would be even if he were right. Because rising temperatures are indicative of only one thing — rising temperatures — it’ll take more than an upward trend line to change our minds.
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Gail Combs – insult? I asked him in what sense he considers himself a member of the climate science community. He can answer that, if he wants to, and I’m sure he doesn’t need you to appoint yourself his spokesperson.
“stevo says:
November 17, 2011 at 5:58 pm
Application of well-defined mathematical principles to well defined actual numbers tells us that there is no significance to 1998. Your efforts to give it some importance are pure cherry picking.”
I was initially responding to your initial post at:
“stevo says:
November 14, 2011 at 1:39 am
All these upward lines don’t look much like a downward trend to me.”
Here, you plotted HadCrut3 with a upward line of about 45 degrees. It looked huge due to the y-axis numbers. Your plot was from 1998. The actual value on your graph was 0.00039/year. This is as insignificant as my extremely small negative value by changing the starting date a few months further back. So it appears as if we both did some cherry picking! As a matter of fact, the slope changes from positive to negative merely by going back from November 1997 to October 1997.
“So it appears as if we both did some cherry picking!”
No. I was showing that someone had picked the wrong cherry, claiming that there were downwards trends since 1998 – they were lying.
“As a matter of fact, the slope changes from positive to negative merely by going back from November 1997 to October 1997.”
The conclusion is absurdly obvious. If including one extra data point changes the trend so much, then you haven’t got enough data. But if you refuse to understand basic statistics, then you will keep on failing to grasp simple conclusions like this.
Doing a little checking of our database, it turns out that “stevo” is just the repackaged “RW” of the City College of London, who has been previously banned from WUWT.
He’s violated site rules (again) by changing his screen name and email to get around that.
So, Roger, let me make this really clear, really simple. Next time you do this it will be full disclosure.
You have been banned from WUWT previously, that means get out, stay out. You aren’t welcome here and I don’t have to put up with your shape shifting shenanigans, kid.
– Anthony Watts
“stevo says:
November 18, 2011 at 6:19 pm
No. I was showing that someone had picked the wrong cherry, claiming that there were downwards trends since 1998 – they were lying.”
Look at the exact words of whoever you were quoting.
As you noted at stevo says:
November 14, 2011 at 1:39 am:
RSS does give a negative slope from 1998 with a value of -0.0032.
I went back to your post and it says “As far as cherry picking. 1998 is the warmest year in the past 20 years. The temperature has not surpassed that year on any metric except GISS, which is understandable as GISS uses a 1200km radius in the Arctic which has been shown to be very questionable. The error bars of GISS also indicate that what some call warm in 2008 could be cool.”
To put it in different words, whoever wrote the above claimed, in effect, that according to HadCrut3 and uah, 1998 was the warmest year. That is true. Unless I am not reading something right, you are then accusing that person of lying because the trend is positive for HadCrut3 and uah since 1998. This is NOT what the person claimed. It is quite possible and in fact it DID happen that 1998 is BOTH the warmest year on at least these two data sets and yet the slope from 1998 is positive on both of these data sets.
“If including one extra data point changes the trend so much, then you haven’t got enough data.”
WHOA! I never said anything about “so much”. The difference is totally negligible. For one month, it is +2.226 x 10^-6 and for the other, -0.0001778. I do not know where the cut off is between what is significant or not, but for several months around 1998, according to HadCrut3, the trend is almost flat. Do you not agree with that?