Sunday, January 06, 2008

Jacoby's Untruths

Jeff Jacoby is back with another anti-global warming screed in the Boston Globe. These are getting easier and easier to refute (and less and less worthwhile), and someday soon we will be able to outsource this task to third-graders for their study halls.

1) Weather is not climate.

2) According to the NASA GISS global surface temperature survey (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp), Jan-Nov 2007 was the 2nd warmest year on record, a mere 0.02°C below the record year of 2005. (Note: 2005 is globally the warmest year on record, not, as Jacoby claims, 1998.) And December's results are not yet in.

3) It is possible to cherry-pick lots of temporarily cold places, which is exactly what Jacoby has done here. It is not scientifically honest. It says absolutely nothing about climate.

4) Global temperatures ARE NOT flat since 1998. The 5-yr moving average has increased 0.34°C in the last 10-years. See http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2007/10/ball-is-wrong.html . I have asked both Tim Ball and David Deming for their time series of data and their graphs, and both have declined to provide any data.

3 comments:

Bill Hennessy said...

Let me play defense lawyer where my duty is to refute only one of your assertions.

You claim 2005 was the hottest year on record. But according to NASA, it was 1934.

Besides, even NASA admits that other competent researches can demonstrate that 2005 was the hottest:

Other groups that study climate change also rank these years as among the warmest, though the exact rankings vary depending upon details of the analyses. Results differ especially in regions of sparse measurements, where scientists use alternative methods of estimating temperature change.


Take notes if you can't keep up.

David Appell said...

Bill, your NASA link is for US temperatures only, not global temperatures.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for commenting on my blog. I don't claim to be a scientist. Unfortunately, global warming has become a Gnostic cause led not by science and scientists, but by people of every sort who want to catch a cultural wave.

I have posted on the topic before, usually to stake out a skeptical position, not with the scientists, but with the mob set to capitalize on the issue.

I question whether we human beings, most of us being given less than a hundred summer solstices on this planet, have the perspective to judge its trends, cycles, and fate. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, today's science is tomorrow's myth.

Don't get me wrong. I love science and a scientific discussion. I'm afraid that science, especially popular and public science, is now driven by the fads of the grant foundations, National Geographic being Exhibit IA.

Keep blogging. You and I don't agree on many issues, but you are thoughtful and you blast the media where is ought to be blasted. My blog is conservative as its author, but I write it with the intention of discussing issues of public concern. I am not interested in preaching to my own church choir in my own ghetto.

Finally, the words of my mentor Russell Kirk, who said: "It is not a conservative cause to sell the national parks to private developers!"