another thing I don't understand

[calimac]

It's a common factoid that the actual temperature rises of the earth have leveled off in the last couple of decades.  Here's a climate scientist site discussing and explaining why that doesn't negate global warming. Here's a news report claiming that scientists are trying to hide the fact. Here's a skeptic who ain't buying the explanations.

Yet I am also reading regular reports that the earth's temperature is continuing to rise and set new records.  A new one came in today.  Here's the graph. Here's the news story.

So what's the story here?  The natural variability in a general rise, as is the usual explanation, can't be the whole story, because according to these other stories the temperature is rising.  Is it that one is measuring sea temperatures, the other atmospheric temperatures, or something else?  Is the lack of temperature rise purely a statistical sleight of hand trick?  (I've seen this argued, but not always.)  Look at the random jumps in the last graph.  See that particularly outstanding high around 1997?  Notice that, until the latest data point, none of the successive ones is higher than that, even though the trend is still up?  You could say the temperature hasn't gotten higher since 1997, though you'd be criminally misleading by saying so.  Is that all it is, though?

Comments

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

Well, one reason this is confusing is there are a bunch of people trying to make it so. And there are lots of opportunities to do so. Not only is cherry-picking a start year a good way to hide trends (the Daily Mail loves to show graphs starting at that very hot 1997), not all the series are exactly the same (one of the graphs you linked to was "yearly average" temps, one was "annual June temps", not surprising they agree in overall long-term trends but disagree on shorter-term ones.) So one can always look around for the series that can best be distorted to support one's theory.

It is true that there looks like a flattening in the yearly average temp series over about the last decade, and it does seem reasonable to look to see if there is any other data to help us decide whether global warming has mysteriously stopped or it's just being swamped by some other short-term phenomenon.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But, at least in some statistics, the pause is really there. I accept the reasons why this isn't significant, but it would be a lot less confusing if the people explaining that it isn't significant would point to the other statistics that show no pause, or explain how they coexist.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Of course it's being swamped by other short-term phenomena. I've seen it categorically stated that, if you control for all known factors like volcanic eruptions and El Nino cycles, the temperature is still going up.