Tuesday, April 14, 2015

See Steyn Lie

In another post by a climate expert, Mark Steyn writes:
"As I've said before, if you graduated from college last summer, there's been no "global warming" since you were in kindergarten."
This is getting so bad now this can only be called what it is: a lie. Purposeful deceit. Scientific fiction.

Blatantly, it ignores ocean warming, the best of all indicators of global warming. (As they say, it's called "global warming," not "surface warming" and not "only-RSS-and-no-other-datasets-allowed warming.")

The correct statement is:
If you graduated from college last summer, you've just lived through the warmest 12 months of your life. And of your parents' lives, and your grandparents' too.
I hesitate to confuse Steyn with numbers, but... assuming one is 5 years old in kindergarten, and 22 when they graduated college last summer (so most people would be 23 at this piont), that's the cherry picked "18 years."

So let's look at NASA GISS's temperature anomaly since Jan 1997:


Or this, showing the last 12 months are the warmest such period in GISS's records:


Of course, those looking to fool others like to pretend the only data that exists anywhere in the world is from RSS:


while completely ignoring the other data that measures the same thing, but which has better coverage of the globe (UAH misses 0.9% of Earth's surface; RSS misses 6.9%).


I won't even get into error bars and statistical significance and all that -- it would pass through Steyn as just more dark energy. Or Cowtan and Way (trend of +0.11 C over 18 years.) Or ocean warming, the best of all indicators of global warming. Or the role of natural variability, or that 18 years is too short to be indicative of climate change anyway. 

The liars like Mark Steyn don't want to hear anything about all that. Climate science is, for him, just another thing to hate on, another faucet for his bile.

2 comments:

TheTracker said...

Nice post. Minor: Midway through you change the spelling of Steyn's name. Feel free to delete this comment.

John said...

One "Stein" remains, in the line immediately below the last graph.