That’s right! The Denialosphere is all a twitter again as parts of the earth have been experiencing some
Global Cooling
record cold from London to Florida. Climate change is over! as long as you are willing to ignore reality in at least four ways.
So certain are they of this absurdity that Marc Morano was apparently willing to spend a significant portion of his life compiling 12 pages of irrelevant news stories. As a tribute to this waste of time Jennifer Morahasey has kindly published them as “News Reports for October Indicate Global Cooling.”
You will recall Morahasey has recently brightened our lives with such great comic pieces as the Denier Top Ten and even reprinted Lorne Gunter’s delusions of adequacy, so this promises to be good.
So there has been a lot of reports of cold lately, doesn’t that prove something? No, not really. The claim is misleading in at least four ways: i) cherry picking data, ii) sampling bias and corrupt data base iii) claiming weather allows you to predict climate, and iv) ignoring the actual climate data. As a bonus it also reveals the Denier’s hypocrisy.
i) cherry picking data
Cherry picking is the art of choosing only the data that supports you and ignoring data that doesn’t. It is a common Denier method (eg see Richard Keen). A sampling of news reports from the same period as those reported by Morano:
County hit by record heat, brush fire Oct 9, 2008, Near-record heat sizzles on in Valley Oct. 30, 2008, Heat again a concern for marathon Chicago, Oct 12, 2008, Heat Wave in East Java to Last Until November 21 October, 2008, South Australia will swelter through temperatures in the high 30s , The temperature in Dar es Salaam last week reached 34.7 degrees centigrade October 28, 2008.
It may be cold in some places, but it’s definitely not in others. Morano was not looking to see what the weather was, he was looking for stories of cold. Of course there are a lot more stories of cold than heat, which leads us to:
ii) sampling bias and corrupt data
In the first place look at any map and notice that most land masses are in the Northern Hemisphere. There is a rumour that the North is entering winter (but I debunk that below ;-)) So it could be unbelievably hot in the Indian Ocean or South Pacific and the popular media wouldn’t report it.
Another sampling bias is the concentration of media in the Industrialized West. The multiple news agencies means the same cold snap in the US gets reported hundreds of times while the brutal heat in Indonesia is totally ignored. This is a problem of data redundancy (ie same data included two or more times) on top of data exclusion (leaving out data).
That the number of news stories is no measure of temperature also begs the question of how extensive the areas affected are. A small area of NE United States being cold does not negate a huge area of the Indian Ocean being hot. This media sampling gives us no idea of what the actual global average is like.
Finally there is the issue of data padding. Many of Morano’s “news stories about cold” are not news stories about cold at all. He has bulked up the list with a bunch of the usual Denier spam, including Gunter’s Folly (twice), repeats on the Arctic Ice Meme, the Sunspot Meme, and then padding it even further by listing some of the spam reported on in the articles he has already listed.
For an attempt at pseudo-research by a lay person it is a pretty lame attempt, even by the standards of junior high school.
iii) claiming weather allows you to predict climate
Annual Season Theory Debunked
Weather and climate are not the same thing at all and you cannot use local weather to predict the other (link for Deniers). To illustrate this let’s have a bit of fun 🙂
Here are the temperatures over the last few days for where I live (right). As you can clearly see, contrary to Annual Season Theory it is not getting colder at all, it is getting hotter. “Seasonal Cooling” ended on October 29th!
Temperatures have risen 15oC (27oF) in just a couple of days. “Winter” is NOT coming, Annual Season Theory is a hoax. Seasonal “cooling has ended!
In fact as this next graph (below) shows , “seasonal cooling” ended at least seven times in the past two months.
Seasonal Cooling has Ended ... 7 times!
Winter Not Coming - New Summer by December
This is real temperature data that was scientifically measured, not just popular news stories like Morano used, so clearly it is true.
In fact, inspired by Gunter and Keen I have plotted the projection (above) which clearly shows that we will be experiencing a new summer by December. Take THAT Al Gore!
Of course it’s utterly stupid. So stupid that I am hoping Morahasy will publish this on her blog.
If local weather is such a useless predictor of the season, how much more ridiculous to try and predict climate with the same kind of data? Apparently some people think you can.
iv) ignoring the actual climate data
It is possible to predict climate of course. Just as my hand drawn trend line up to Oct 26th gives you an idea of what is really happening, so you take a lot of weather data from all over the planet spanning decades and you look at what that tells you.
And what it tells us is that the weather may go up and down, even with some record cold snaps, but the temperature trend is rising. So far 2008 is actually the 10th hottest year in 129 yrs, and it is a myth that Temperatures plummeted in 2008.
Global Temperature with 100-Month Moving Average
Denier Hypocrisy
Which brings us to Denier hypocrisy. If they actually believed that short term weather trends told us anything about climate then every time we experience a heat wave they would be reporting “Global Warming is Real”
Events like the 2003 European heat wave and the 2006 drought (see “Climate Change Ended in 1998!“) undoubtedly saw these same blogs and web sites talking about how climate change was real and just how right Al Gore was.
Right.
Good Luck finding those stories.
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Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 27 … still no evidence.
IMAGE CREDITS:
Greenfyre's 
Actually, I believe they’d oppose your debunking of Annual Season Theory because your graph is shaped like a hockey stick, and remains hockey-stick-shaped even when extended back substantially. We all know that no good can come from hockey sticks.
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But you see, Chewbacca lives on Endor, therefore you must acquit.
— bi, International Journal of Inactivism
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Ah, Morano and Marohasey, the careless rapture of two shills in heat. Back in March, Marohasey gushed over an encounter she had with Morano, describing meeting this man as a ‘highlight’of the media stunt she was attending, and a ‘privilege’ for her personally. The fact that he uses taxpayer funds to run his disinformation program from a government address does not seem to trouble her…but what does?
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It’s that popular global corporatist recipe: “all the facts don’t fit my agenda muddle stew.” It’s very simple to make: add big dollars, small minds, stir until muddled, serve with your favorite conspiracy theory.
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Someone pointed out that Morano’s “Minority Report” site is gearing up for a big release of an expanded “Inhofe 650” list. [1] Sounds like Morano wants to message-bomb Poznan with fresh denialist clippings…
For fun, see my website where I’ve taken the list of the real scientists in wg 1 of the IPCC AR4, and tracked down their university or research institute homepages. I found pages for 561 out of the 619 authors (the rest mostly can’t have a homepage under the rules at the Tyndall Centre, US Navy, or else they are with NOAA and just work quietly without a real homepage.) [2]
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That is a hugely impressive piece of work, Jim Prall.
(Or more correctly, two hugely impressive pieces).
I would have said so on your blog, but (so far) I’ve resisted aquiring a google/blogger account.
And you did it “for fun”. 🙂
The world needs people like you.
LOL. The AGW movement accuses others of cherry picking data but uses as evidence of warming convenient start points that coincide with the end of the Little Ice Age or the point at which the PDO switched into its warm phase.
Climate changes continually and there are many natural cycles that effect temperatures. When the PDO goes into its positive phase we expect temperatures to be warmer than when it is into its negative phase so there is little to worry about. When the sun is in a period of low activity we expect temperatures to decline. When we pick as a start point the end of a warm period we expect to see cooling and when we pick the end of a cooling period we expect warming.
The issue isn’t climate change but what is causing climate to change. On that front the AGW movement has failed miserably and has little in the way of transparent scientific data and methods to support its position.
web
It’s that popular global corporatist recipe: “all the facts don’t fit my agenda muddle stew.” It’s very simple to make: add big dollars, small minds, stir until muddled, serve with your favorite conspiracy theory.
Actually, the big bucks go to the people who go along with the AGW line of argument. That is where the overwhelming amount of grant money is going.
Given the collapse of the IPCC’s credibility and the admission that many of the alarmist claims have not been supported by peer reviewed science the AGW claims are in a death spiral from which there is no salvation for the faithful. In the end, the AGW proponents will be seen as deserving punchlines to a very sad joke.
Vangel once again shows that he is living in an alternate universe where up is down, lies are facts and he is considered to be an intellectual giant. Glad I don’t live in that universe.
Ian wrote: “Vangel once again shows that he is living in an alternate universe where up is down, lies are facts and he is considered to be an intellectual giant. Glad I don’t live in that universe.”
If you don’t live in a cave you should be aware that the IPCC’s credibility is falling apart. Its numerous errors, unsupported statements, and references of non-peer-reviewed propaganda from green activists have been all over the European press and the Australians and New Zealanders are asking about why their governments can’t produce the methods used to adjust data showing a flat to down trend to show a warming trend. The CRU has yet to release its data and code and NASA is still hiding its own algorithms.
When Bob Watson calls for an investigation, you know that the rats are abandoning ship.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026932.ece
He admits, “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”
Add to this the pathetic Jones interview with the BBC in which he admits that the rate of the warming trend is not unusual and that the only reason that the warming since 1950 must be man made was because the modellers could not explain it, and you have an all out rout in your position.
Vangel, if you had any functioning neurons at all you would see that it is the British press which is mired in dishonesty and fairy tales.
There are certain journalists, and I use the term very loosely, who are as dishonest as the big name AGW deniers.
Look out for some major lawsuits against a number of fishwrap producers in the Uk and hopefully elsewhere.
Why do you continue to make yourself look so foolish?
Most people who are as uninformed as you try and keep it under wraps, you seem to wave a large banner proclaiming that you are utterly devoid of any basic scientific understanding at all.