Newest Right-Wing Climate Fiasco: No Climate Change Over Past 11 Years
You publish a scientific paper, and people are bound to criticize you. Publish your data online for the world see for themselves in the name of transparency, you get this figure:
Figure 1: “No change” in global temperature over past decade
The right-wing argument is the following:
1) If CO2 causes global warming, the continued increase in global warming should cause a continued increase in global temperature averages.
2) Average temperatures have ceased to increase in the last decade, in comparison to the average from 1950-1980.
3) Average CO2 production has only increased over time.
4) Therefore, since CO2 is constantly rising, and global temperature averages have not changed, AGW is not caused by CO2.
5) We shouldn’t regulate CO2. WOOT!
Dr. Judith Curry, 2nd co-Author in the BEST papers and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, has been quoted saying the following by the Daily Mail:
This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting. Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.
This is what happens in science people. You see an anomaly and you try to explain it. It does NOT discredit the theory of AGW (as global temperature averages have certainly increased), but the effects may have changed over time after a threshold amount of CO2. The article, which I have yet to read, cites possible additional causes such as solar radiation, cloud formation, and natural temperature cycles, something that their work has included. Dr. Curry continues:
There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped. To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.
If you read the whole Mail article, which I suggest you don’t, you’ll find that many of the comments that Dr. Curry made are related to the fact that she was miffed that Dr. Muller, the Berkley scientist who sparked the controversy, started talking to reporters, saying that the data irrefutably proved the causation between CO2 and global temperature change.
Of course this isn’t the end of skepticism. To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, ‘Oh my God.”
Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.
However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.Prof Ross McKittrick, a climate statistics expert from Guelph University in Ontario, added: ‘You don’t look for statistically significant evidence of a standstill. ‘You look for statistically significant evidence of change.’
And the echo chamber is ringing!
Ed Morrissey/HotAir: Surprise! No warming in last 11 years
GayPatriot: Media-hyped global warming “skeptic” was no such thing