Will All the Global "Cooling" Idiots Please Stand Up?

Seriously! You know who you are! The ones whose mouths have been wagging the past three years or so, announcing that global warming has ceased and the planet has steadily been on a cooling trek since 1998. Raise your hands, morons!

Now, new NOAA examination of existing data plus a separate AP-team investigation shows that this was all misbegotten, misuse of statistics. As per the article in today's Denver Post ('Analysts Dispute Claim that the World is Now Cooling Off', p. 8A) the real conclusion (for non-boneheads) from the NOAA itself is:

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record"

Quoting NOAA climate-monitoring chief, Deke Arndt.

Of course, anyone the least bit skeptical of the cooling gibberish could have found out this was all so much rubbish by himself, even before the new studies. They merely needed to access the source paper that started it all, which first appeared in Nature (May, 2006) written by Dr. Noel Keenlyside et al, wherein a tentative claim for monotonic global cooling since ca. 1998 was put forward. This twenty byte excerpt (minus the reading in context) then 'jumped the shark' and became embedded into the warming skeptics' arsenal of disinfo and set real global warming science education back at least a decade in my estimation.

Now, when one broaches warming anywhere, he is met with specious citations of the Keenlyside et al paper as "proof" it isn't happening. At the root of this misapprehension by the faux skeptics is misinterpretation of the data and statistical methods appearing in the paper - not at all helped by the media which have also misconstrued it.

Even Editors who fully knew the actual original source still couldn't be bothered to consult it, they opted to get their info 2nd hand (like from the 'Investor's Business Daily', or 'Drudge Report') then bloviate how global warming is wrong, or "hyped" in sundry editorials. Wrong and strong, as the saying goes.

People prone to the denial weltanschauung then read these superficial reports, missed the key core clues, and bruited it all about that they (deniers, skeptics) were right all along. Instead of taking shortcuts, skeptics could have retrieved the ACTUAL paper from NATURE! They could have studied the paper's key figure(3), the one that looks at past and (forecast) future global temperatures, "Hindcast/forecast decadal variations in global mean temperature, as compared with observations and standard climate model projections".

The first thing they’d have noted about the figure -- indeed, one major source of confusion -- is that each point represents a ten-year centered mean. That is, each point represents the average temperature of the decade starting 5 years before that point and ending 5 years after that point. Thus, the statistics for potential “cooling” could not possibly have been justifiably extrapolated beyond 1998 + 5 = 2003. Yet math and stats imbeciles all over the place have insisted it was ongoing.

This ignorance and perpetuation of such was incepted because too many simpletons- both on the net, and in the media- took the repeated gushing claims about warming "now changed to cooling" without examining the key source paper themselves. Even some vaunted “experts” at the Allexperts site, have climbed aboard this moron bandwagon., e.g.

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Astronomy-1360/2009/10/Astronomy-global-warming.htm

Second, the skeptics would have spotted the red line in the Nature publication and – if bright enough – beheld that it was the actual global temperature data from the U.K.'s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research. They ought to have asked: Why does the red line stop in 1998 and not 2007? Again, it’s a running 10-year mean, and the authors use data from a Hadley paper that ends around 2003, In effect, they can't do a ten-year centered mean after 1998.

Lazy deniers, however, have parlayed this simple statistical peculiarity of the data into believing that global warming factually STOPPED in 1998!

Third, at least one genius denier might have spotted the black line in the Figure, which was actually one of the IPCC scenario projections, labelled 'A1B.' It denotes a relatively high-CO2-growth model -- but actual carbon emissions since 2000 have wildly outpaced it. A further check by skeptics of the solid green line - the "hindcast" of the authors – e.g. how well their model compared to actual data (and the A1B scenario) could also be done. The lazy morons would have seen that, if extended (in dashes) through 2010 and finally to 2025, it JOINED up with A1B! In other words, Keenlyside et al's paper actually concurs with the IPCC projection that warming will ramp up majorly past 2010!

What is dismaying to those who have done serious research is how deficient the average denier-skeptic is, and how difficult it is to impart correct interpretation of data minus the bogey of ideology which stalks every word written on global warming. Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has referred to the trend of skeptic science sown for political or economic ends - e.g. in imparting ignorance and faux skepticism, agnotology. It is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made (and as we know NO scientific theory is free of these 100%, even such rich theories as quantum mechanics and special relativity).

The sad outcome of the agnotology dynamic in the USA, in terms of exploiting the "global cooling" baloney is an even larger segment of the public vs. 3 years ago, mostly brainwashed by the Fox-ites and right wing think tanks, now believe global warming is a "hoax". Latest figures from the Pew research Center show that now barely 57% accept standard, human-engendered warming theory, as opposed to 77% three years earlier. Add this now to the majoritiy of 'Muricans who still refuse to accept evolution and no wonder most of the developed industrial world laughs at us as uneducated hicks and rubes.

Better physics education may be needed, but I think a large dollop of critical thinking and training in scientific interpretation is also needed. In addition, it may now be time to re-implement the Fairness Doctrine that was cut in the Reagan years. Contrary to conservative political malarkey, this doctrine doesn't remove free speech, it merely allows intelligent counterpoint to whatever bald claims are made on talk radio, OR on cable TV. Especially FOX and its three stooges variety show of Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.