Stumble it!Blogs, and creationists, for Global Warming Ended in 1998
posted in Politics by themaiden |Both Mark Noonan of Blogs for Bush and DaveScot of Uncommon Descent reference the same Bob Carter article as evidence that global warming just ain’t happening.
The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.
It would have been interesting to have a direct link to those “accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” because, funny, it doesn’t look that way to me. A graph from page 6 of the IPCC’s 2007 Summary for Policymakers (PDF) looks to be in direct contradiction to Carter’s statements. And so does this:
It doesn’t take a lot of thought to recognize Carter’s shell game. Temperatures spiked in 1998. He’s referencing against the hottest year he could find, interestingly ignoring that as of 2006 the year 2005 was the hottest on record. That is cherry-picking. If you look at 1999 or 2000 you can ‘prove’ that the planet is warming about twice as fast as it actually is, but that wouldn’t be fair either.
[Edit: For those of you confused by the lack of correspondence between the picture and my paragraph, NASA has updated the graph to include a few more years and it is now no longer even remotely possible imagine making the claims that Carter still makes.]
Look at the 5-year average and Carter’s leveling-off just doesn’t show up. Of course, that won’t prevent the endless citation of his article as slam-dunk proof that global warming ain’t happening.
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