If in 2018 the "warmest year on record" is still 1998, will AGW-believers point to the 30 year average?

Question

If that happens, the five year average is unlikely to show a continued up-trend. Same for the ten and fifteen year averages.

Twenty, perhaps, with a leveling-off.

Will they then point to the 30-year average?

Answer 1

I'll give you the same answer I've given to this same question the other dozen times it's been asked.  It depends on why temperatures have not increased.

If there are a series of major volcanic eruptions between now and 2018, the resulting temperatures will not disprove AGW, for example.

This is why you can't just consider the global temperature - you have to consider what's causing it to change.

Now, if the temperature does not increase by 2018 *and* you can provide an explanation based on solid physics why this proves AGW is incorrect, then I'll acknowledge that AGW is flawed.  What the deniers are lacking is the fundamental physics, which support AGW.

Answer 2

AGW-believers will use whatever time period works best to take over every portion of your daily life.  By that time many of the believers will be enslaved by their own bosses.

Answer 3

But Randall 1998 was not the warmest year on record, it was 1934 the year of the great drought, the mid west dust bowl and the Oki excursion to California for work. 1998 was a whole couple of degrees cooler than 1998. So the period from 1931 to 1942 is going down in the record books as the hottest years in modern recorded history. But still not as warm as pervious warm periods like the short one that spiked about 1600 and collapsed for no known reason into the little ice age.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L.Mencken

Answer 4

I just ran your question through a quick analysis and found that even if 1998 isn't exceeded by 2018, the 30-year (1989 - 2018) trend line can still show a clear 0.12C/decade warming.

By plugging in annual global temps below 1998 (starting at 2007 and slowly incrementing up to just below the 1998 level by 2018) the warming trend is still statistically significant.

Edit:

Randall - Really now? Just for grins I decided to use some additional years for the base (since you think 2007 is somehow special). I divided the difference between each base year and 1998 and incrementally increased the subsequent years (2008 - 2018), starting at the base year level until 2018 was just below 1998, and here's my results for each base year:

2000 => 0.091C/decade 30-year warming trend

2001 => 0.113C/decade 30-year warming trend

2002 => 0.124C/decade 30-year warming trend

2003 => 0.124C/decade 30-year warming trend

2004 => 0.120C/decade 30-year warming trend

2005 => Didn't do, since in the NOAA dataset I'm using 2005 was warmer than 1998

2006 => 0.121C/decade 30-year warming trend

2007 => 0.122C/decade 30-year warming trend

What this CLEARLY shows is that the emphasis non-mathematicians and non-scientists, like yourself, keep making on 1998 being the hottest year is statistically insignificant.  1998 was over 2σ above the trend line, meaning we wouldn't expect to see that exceeded again for quite a while.

Answer 5

More than anything, they want to be taken seriously, so I doubt they'll still be using moving averages at that point.  More likely, they will have completely converted to "climate change" mode:  Pointing out any and all anomalies from "average" throughout the world as evidence man is evil.

Answer 6

Everyone will just have to excuse my fundamentalism...But whats the the point to having records and stats if you already know the outcome? Isn't that in itself a admission of doubt?