The non-suprising dynamics of climate change
On his weblog Open Mind Tamino makes some graphs of decadal climate change. He writes:
Those who are in denial of global warming insist that the last decade of global temperature contradicts what was expected by mainstream climate scientists.
Here’s global temperature data from NASA GISS before the 21st century, for the time span 1975 to 2000:
I’ve computed and plotted a trend line using linear regression. In addition, I’ve plotted dashed lines two standard deviations above and below the trend line — we expect most of the data to fall within these dashed lines. Finally, I’ve projected those lines out to the present day.
That’s what mainstream climate scientists expected to happen.
Here’s what actually happened.
Gosh. What actually happened is exactly what was expected. Exactly. By mainstream climate scientists. You know, those folks who keep telling us that human activity is warming the planet and that it’s dangerous.
Tamino also shows that various alternative climate data sets show the same pattern. And as Nature reports the UK Met Office shows the last decade was the warmest recorded, since instrumental records began in 1850.
Related posts:
I don’t think anyone is in denial that the climate changes. These graphs that you have presented are clear evidence of climate change, but none of them are evidence that CO2 is the cause. This is what the denialists are still waitng for, where is the evidence that CO2 is the cause?
[...other non-related comments deleted]
The Introduction:
A Hyperlinked History of Climate Change Science
in Spencer Weart’s book a The Discovery of Global Warming provides an introduction to how over a century of scientific thinking about human increases in CO2 drives warming.
Klem:
On the contrary, “the earth is actually cooling” argument is frequently used by climate change sceptics (a recent illustrative example from Australian politics – http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/politics/abbotts-climate-change-policy-is-bullshit-20091207-kdmb.html).
This graph debunks this very neatly