Sunday, November 06, 2011

The Laughable Result They Call "Cooling"

So I have a better handle on how Anthony Watts et al are claiming some kind of "cooling." You have to dig really, really deep to find something that looks it.

They take the annual contiguous U.S. surface average from NCDC from here. Here it is (in Fahrenheit):

1991 53.90
1992 53.34
1993 52.00
1994 53.64
1995 53.45
1996 52.62
1997 53.02
1998 55.08
1999 54.67
2000 54.00
2001 54.41
2002 53.94
2003 54.02
2004 53.83
2005 54.36
2006 55.04
2007 54.38
2008 53.00
2009 53.07
2010 53.71

Now, the 10-yr change in the 10-yr moving average of this data is 0.40 °F (for 2010). That's a significant warming from one decade to the next.

But if you cherry-pick the time interval to something that isn't climatologically significant and just look at the annual data for the last 10 years, you get a linear trend of -0.92 ± 0.65 °F/decade. That's not even statistically significant to 1.5 sigma. And the interval ends in a strong La Nina. And USA48 is only 5.4% of the Earth's land area, and 1.6% of the Earth's total area. And using temperatures in F make them look 1.8 times bigger than those in C.

In other words, you have to look extremely hard and do some wild slicing and dicing to find something you can call "cooling." It's laughable to consider it a counterargument to AGW.

1 comment:

Kaustubh said...

David, in his "graphs" the average temperature (black line) is many times, lesser than the actual temperature (red line). I find that hilarious and at the same time disappointing that those idiotic fans of his fail to see it.

WUWT is the only place where a so-called climate discussion turns into a tomato-gardening thread.