Tim Ball's comments

The other day I challenged Tim Ball's assertion that "the world is cooling." I showed temperatures plots for the last several years, and of course it depends on how you want to define "climate" -- do you consider it the last one year of temperatures, the last five years, the last ten years, etc.? Of course, none is inherently correct -- there is no fundamental definition -- but all are meaningful to consider.

As I noted, all moving overages over the last 25 years are increasing, though there is perhaps a small flattening in the last few months of the 5-yr moving average, which frankly doesn't seem all that important.

I wrote Tim Ball and challenged him on these facts, and got back some answers that frankly don't make a lot of sense to me. First he accused me of being with NASA (when really my email address is from NASW), as if that matters to the facts, but then he responded:

Your use of moving averages is misleading.

This didn't make much sense to me, since what is a climate time series except moving averages? So I wrote him back. He responded:

Moving averages have considerable limitations, not the least of which is leaving out data and smoothing a curve to obliterate information. There is also the problem of the loss of data at the beginning and end of a curve depending upon the period chosen for the moving average. Both these points are evident in your curves. You concede the curve is flat "for the last year or so" a vague comment maybe because of the limitations of moving averages, but it requires explanation. It certainly doesn't fit with the CO2 trend.

Of course, I included several different moving averages in my analysis precisely to overcome the problems he tries to imply. You have to have endpoints to your data somewhere. Then he writes:

I am in agreement with Sherwood and Craig Idso that there is no warming evident in the record since 1930. The problem with global temperatures as reported by NASA GISS are well documented at Climateaudit (http://www.climateaudit.org/) including the problems of not adjusting for the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE) adequately and the condition of the recording stations.

This strikes me as absurd. The NASA GISS temperature series is corrected for the urban heat island effect, and the "problems" cited at ClimateAudit are neither systematic (as Eli Rabbett has shown) or peer-reviewed. They're just some amateurs trying to poke holes here there, without much success as far as I can ascertain.

I've asked Ball for the data which he thinks does show no temperture increase since 1930.