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Contact
Jim: jdipeso@rep.org
(253) 740-2066 / 2009
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Cold Water Thrown on the Cooling
Argument
November 2, 2009
The latest must-believe dogma among the climate change denialist crowd is that global warming ended in 1998.
It
goes something like this: even if global warming were real – which it’s
not, mind you – but even if it were, it was all the sun’s fault. And it
stopped in 1998 anyway. So there’s nothing to worry about. So we can
stop all this talk about capping emissions. So there.
You can hear variations on this theme from the talk radio entertainers’ circus tent and their camp followers in Congress.
There’s
even a book out, "Superfreakonomics," written by clever best-selling
authors who, unfortunately, strayed way outside their areas of
expertise and, er, fanned the globe-is-cooling flames.
Rather
than reporting this issue with more of the tiresome he-said, she-said
blather that too often passes for climate science reporting in the
popular press, the Associated Press decided to try a more revealing
tack. The AP gathered up some 130 years of ground temperature data and
30 years of satellite data, then gave the material to independent
statisticians without telling them what it was. AP asked the
statisticians to look for trends.
The statisticians found a distinct long-term upward trend, but no evidence of a significant downward trend.
One
of the statisticians, John Grego, a statistics professor at the
University of South Carolina, told AP later that the globe-is-cooling
argument could be made to look plausible by cherry-picking a starting
point.
Which is what the denialists seem to be doing.
Their favorite starting point is 1998, which was unusually hot because
of a strong El Nino overlain on the underlying global warming trend.
Put the starting point at either 1997 or 1999, Grego told the AP, and
the supposed cooling "trend" vanishes.
Kudos to AP for a
great example of old-fashioned enterprise reporting. The most fervent
of the denialists, however, are not likely to be convinced by
scientific evidence. For them, climate change has nothing to do with
scientific evidence and everything to do with ideology. Climate change
discomfits their world view, and no amount or quality of evidence, even
if it’s as straightforward as 2 + 2 = 4, would change their minds.
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