Sunday, March 16, 2008

Global Cooling? Think Again.

I'm sure many of you have seen this article suggesting that 2007 temperatures were the lowest in 2007, violating the predictions made by AGW theories and suggesting the planet is cooling due to solar activity.

Alas, it is just another example of cherry-picking of the data that we've come to know and expect from denialists. Asher's entire argument is based on one month of data - January 08, which was considerably cooler than January 07, which was, not coincidentally, the warmest month on record. This would be akin to claiming a basketball player's career was in decline because his latest game saw his scoring total drop 20 points from a week earlier when he had his greatest game ever.

As Tim Labert explains and illustrates here, 2007 was the second warmest year on record, and the trends continue up, up, up. When will the denialists realize that you cannot draw conclusions about long term trends based on one data point? Oh, that's right, I keep forgetting. They aren't doing science. They are shuffling data until they get an arrangement that tells them what they want to hear.

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