AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject global cooling
"To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous," said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.2007: A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open « Climate Audit
Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Lab, called it a "a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policy-makers" ahead of international climate talks in December in Copenhagen.
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Of the 10 hottest years recorded by NOAA, eight have occurred since 2000, and after this year it will be nine because this year is on track to be the sixth-warmest on record.
The current El Nino is forecast to get stronger, probably pushing global temperatures even higher next year, scientists say. NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt predicts 2010 may break a record, so a cooling trend "will be never talked about again."
Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.Update: In response to the usual "we don't like the US data, so let's ignore it" argument, I offer the plots here.
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3 comments:
I'm not entirely sure the polemic AP post and the bolded text is helping or hurting the cause. Borenstein found the right people to give him the right quotes, and the whole mess will get picked up on the newswire and eventually end up in a lot of newspapers. I'd hate to think we are contributing to HIS cause.
The ClimateAudit post is talking about US temperatures, the AP is talking about global temperatures.
If I want to provide baseball statistics for the entire league, I don't just look at a single team.
They're both derived from the same thing, NOAA temp records.
The main difference being world temps are not adjusted for urban heat island effect. They just toss the GHCN numbers in the mixer raw. Doesn't matter if their from a backwood lot or on the median of the Ventura Freeway.
Which calls into question why it is that the USA portion of the global temp record only uses high density urban sensor stations?
For instance California is represented by just four thermometers, in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Maria, and San Francisco.
All of them are on the coast. All of them are in high population centers.
Suspicious? You betcha.
Team America has 126 temperature stations in the global "league".
All of them are in cities.
Starting to feel a little hot under the collar?
Me too.
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