How amateurish is it to conclude there has been no warming since 1998?

Question

Just because 1998 is the warmest year in recent history. You don't base temperature trends off one year just like you don't base it off of one day.

That's analogous to (hypothetical situation) pointing to a particular day 20 million years ago which happens to be the warmest in world history, and then concluding we've been in a cooling period since--even though the average temperature during that period 20 million years ago is lower than today's hypothetical temperature.

And these "scientists" that are trumpeting this convenient half-truth know we are in the middle of La Nina, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png

5 year mean continues to climb

Answer 1

Yeah, sort of like using a 5 year mean to conclude that temperatures continue to rise....

Answer 2

check this out http://www.kuummiut.com/

Answer 3

hehe, i thought the warmest year was 2005, then 2006... now it's back to 1998?  What about 1934?  What about the medieval warming period, it was warmer then wasn't it??

I don't think scientist really know what is going on to be honest with ya.

Answer 4

I don't know, I leave it to the "professionals" and don't listen to the amateurs.

Answer 5

Look at the attached.  There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.  Why bother with the arguments about an El Nino anomaly in 1998?  (Incidentally, the red fuzz represents the error ‘bars’.)

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/200...

As for the GISS temperature graphs, they would be a lot more  credible if Hansen was not busy rewriting history to make it appear as there is a warming trend.

http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PA...

Answer 6

Wikipedia just reports what they hear,  just as you are doing.  I would take my 29 year experience against yours any day.  Being a meteorologist,  makes me a defacto Climatologist and I believe tha experience gives credence to denying the manmade aspect of this.

Answer 7

So your contention is that we've been in la nina since 1998? It remains the warmest year on modern record and ten years is as long as it took global warming alarmism to take root, from 1988 to 1998. You'd think a commensurate period would have some impact but of course it doesn't since it's no longer called global warming, now it's climate change so literally anything will fit under the new circus tent.

1998 is a single year, the 10 years since then are what we call a decade and evidently that's a long enough period to cause alarm so it should be enough to reduce that same alarm when the trend goes the other way. The fact that it doesn't, the fact that so many groundstations are affected by the Urban Heat Island effect and insufficient or no correction is made for that, and every storm is blamed on man-made climate change all points to the media being more than willing to trumpet any alarmist claim. What did they blame the last ice age on when people weren't here to cause the problem? Were we responsible for the Holocene event?

What exactly is causing the oceans to cool? The fact is that no one is sure and that points out how little we know about the complex and chaotic climate on Earth. We can't even explain why it's getting warmer and stormier on Jupiter, according to new reports from NASA. When the IPCC models prove accurate in predicting past temp I'll pay a bit more attention to their ability to predict the future.

** edit Feel free to be a lemming and swallow whole whatever the current scientific theory is, but I think I'll pass. Cholesterol is bad for you, well no, sometimes it's good, but only one type. I'm waiting for the next revision on that and I'm not holding my breath. Unless you're incapable of reading the facts for yourself, there's no reason to take the nuggets of pre-digested data the IPCC and the media feed you. Read the working papers, the research and the summaries and you'll see the summaries often make claims not supported by the scientific data they supposedly summarize. It doesn't take a PhD to read a graph and inform yourself. At one time eugenics was the 'wave of the future' and leading scientists were onboard that train. Would you follow that thinking as well, if the consensus told you it was good overall if you no longer existed? Or that handicapped and those with mental problems should be sterilized and then quietly eliminated?

Answer 8

there has been no significant warming since 1998 because in 98' there was the strongest el nino in the pacific ocean ever recorded. since then, the earth has had a pretty steady decline in global temperature. not a massive drop, but it has been dropping. to top it all off, the winter of 2008 was the coldest its been in 60 years.CALIFORNIA had record snowfall, COLORADO had record snowfall, MONTANA has had record snowfall, WASHINGTON, NORTH DAKOTA, SOUTH DAKOTA, WISCONSIN, MAINE all have had record snowfall. i live in Wisconsin and we had record snowfall, and had a record cold low of -20 degrees.almost every state has had record cold temperatures in the year of 2008. April was the coldest month for the UNITED STATES in 114 years.

ANTARCTICA HAS 1.5 MILLION SQUARE MILES MORE ICE THAN IT HAD IN THE YEAR 2007, AND IT IS HIGHEST ITS BEEN IN OVER 35 YEARS.

Answer 9

Ok.. we are not in a La-Nina anymore, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has switched to it's cool phase, the Earth is and will continue to cool.

http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/da...

The PDO operates on 25 - 30 year cycles.  As contaminated as the US ground base temperature record is, the PDO's influence can clearly be seen as alternating warm and cool phase changes.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

The global surface temperature record is far to sparse and biased by civilization to allow the man made and natural temperature trends to be partitioned over the last 3 decades, but satellites do not indicate any global warming over the last decade. In fact there is not a even guess about how much of the warming over the last 30 years was directly caused by the PDO in its warm phase.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.c...

If you believe the PDO is responsible for global warming, I would say it's no more amateurish than the outlandish short term climate predictions that alarmists make that always seem to never stick, like the collapse of the skiing industry.

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Answer 10

Don't worry about the idiots.  People who understand science have finally convinced the policy makers.  The debate is over.  There are still flat-earthers but nobody listens to them anymore.

Answer 11

It's a completely amateurish argument.

a) A 10-year span is too short of a time period to calculate a meaningful trend.

b) Applying any sort of statistical analysis proves that the average global temperature has increased during this period anyway (by either NASA or Hadley Centre data).

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/0...

Despite constantly making these sorts of amateurish claims, deniers always complain that we don't take them seriously.  It irritates me.

I find eric c's link of Lindzen on Watt's website amusing.  Not only does Lindzen choose to use Hadley Centre data and ignore the NASA GISS data, but then he doesn't even calculate a trend!  He just plots the data and says 'trust me, there's no trend'.  As you can see in my second link, there is indeed an upward trend even in the Hadley data, which unlike the NASA data doesn't model for the Arctic (where there are no temperature stations) where the warming is greatest.  He's basically lying by omission on many levels.

I don't blame the layman skeptics for not knowing better, but Lindzen should.  That sort of behavior is why when the skeptics say 'our side has scientists too' we respond 'so what?'.

Answer 12

Please note 1934 was the warmest year in recorded history and not 1998. The first report probably said 1998 but a later and final report of the study shows 1934. This was not reported in much of the media.

Answer 13

Very, how does anyone even come up with that?

Also, anyone ever saying that the 30s were worse, forget that it only had to do with the USA, and 2006 proved to be just as bad if not worse (for the US).  'Globally', it has been warming, not cooling.

I hear this same similar argument when people are referring to the Medieval Warm Period, saying it was warmer then than now also, which is also WRONG.

We are having a couple of cooler years now due them following an El Niño, but the reality is, it is only expected to be worse again, and worse then some.