[graycat]

Many thanks for the link. Thanks, I needed that. So, the link has not only temperature data but the IPCC predictions. Terrific. I put the link where I can find it easily and won't lose it. I'd been hoping for just some such article. Terrific.

[bjz_]

WUWT is notorious for cherry picking data. Be very skeptical of their claims.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-19...

[anthonyb]

I don't think that's cherry picked; it looks like an outright fabrication to me. What are the odds that a line of regression on a graph like that would come out to exactly +0.00C?

[Tuna-Fish]

Out of a sufficiently noisy continuous dataset, you can actually do that quite easily simply by moving the start position until you hit exactly +0.00C. Which is what I suspect he did. If you move it forwards a few months, you get negatives until you leave that one anomalous spike out, and if you move it backwards, you start to get positives very quickly.

[graycat]

I didn't pay much attention to the fitted line. To take such a line seriously, need a lot of mathematical assumptions in practice nearly always impractical or impossible to get.

I did pay attention to what I said, the temperature data and the IPCC projections. I was glad to see both.

So, let's see: The link to skeptical science says that there is a lot of warming but it is in the oceans and that their work considering the 'energy' (i.e., temperature?) in the first 700 or 3000 meters shows that. And that warming is supposed to have been caused by warming of the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect of human generated CO2 in the atmosphere. So, we can't see the warming in the atmosphere, but somehow the atmosphere is supposed to be warming the oceans. Hmm. But, pursuing that point, or such points, of which there are many, to be productive needs much more in data, etc. than we have.

Again, I was happy just seeing the basic temperature data and the IPCC predictions. That's better than pictures of polar bears and icebergs and claims that each hot period, cold period, wet period, dry period, change in wildlife population, blizzard, tornado, hurricane, etc. is evidence of 'climate change' caused by human use of CO2.

For 'climate change theory', I like the one, "follow the money".

I guess if I were running a news company with revenue from ads from eyeballs, then I'd take any excuse I could to write stories to get people up on their hind legs. Old standards were scandal from sinful, evil humans, danger, i.e., the sky is falling. Better yet is the sky is falling caused sinful/evil humans. Better yet is a 'theme' that each day can turn into yet another eyeball grabbing headline and news 'story'.

So, I'd push 'global warming', oops, now 'climate change', too. And, I would have screamed about CFCs and the ozone and how happy I was to be ruining the air conditioners of millions of cars (including two of mine). I'd scream about anything I could, trash in the oceans, death of the oceans, death of the rain forests, loss of US farm land top soil, genetically modified crops, pictures of the arctic showing no ice (can get those in some areas, can vary from year to year, of the arctic during summers), etc.

For the climate change story, I'd show pictures of clouds of water vapor from the cooling towers of nuke electric generating plants and hint that the clouds of water were dangerous CO2 from sinful/evil humans. For any smokestack putting out anything visible, I'd hint that it was CO2. I'd get quotes from Tom Friedman that CO2 absorbs sunlight (of course, that's false; CO2 absorbs in just three narrow bands, all out in the infrared). I'd push anything I could that would get eyeballs.

It's a very old story: Claim that humans are sinful and/or evil. From that claim, a lot of churches long got a lot of revenue, and the old English morality plays got lots of eyeballs.

A big theme in story telling is transgression from sinful/evil humans, retribution from an angry god, and finally redemption from sacrifice. So, for the transgression of sinful/evil humans and their emissions of CO2, the retribution is 'climate change', right, with lots of coastal cities flooding, coral reefs being bleached, the tropics converted to deserts, the northern temperate zone pushed to the arctic circle, nearly all fauna extinct, etc., and the redemption is sacrifice, e.g., give up cars, air conditioning, washing machines, return to walking or bicycles, grow own food, get electric power, catch as catch can, from wind and solar, etc. So, more news stories, lots each day, on each little part of this old trilogy.

But, instead of such new blizzards of nonsense, I was happy to see the actual temperature record and the IPCC predictions.

There's a thing about predictions: People can remember them. While the science for predicting temperature is from grimly difficult up to too difficult to do accurately now, we are quite good at measuring temperature, actual temperature in degrees K, C, or F. Then when there is a prediction of temperature, after a decade or so we get to compare the prediction and the measurements. The link I responded to lets us do that.