Friday, November 21, 2008

Bush Cooling?

Today's meme seems to be: the planet has cooled during George Bush's regime.

This conclusion seems based on the following graph, which has been around for a month or two now:


I first saw this graph on a post of Lorne Gunter at the National Post in Canada (who I consider and extremely biased, unreliable source on climate change news and analysis). I asked him how it was derived -- how the trend line was calculated-- but he didn't respond. Nor has anyone else I've asked since.

It looks very suspicious to me: the graph dips awfully suddenly in the last two years, while not lurching upward at all during the El Nino warm period circa 1997-99. Until I see this calculation, I simply can't believe it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"gunter" and "national post".

Dano said...

The key here is that these are lower trop temps, where the measuement peaks at 4-7 km above the surface. Who lives there? How do these temps affect crops? They don't. Therefore, they don't affect policy either, despite the fact that the small cadre of denialists want you to believe otherwise.

Best,

D