THE "RESEARCH" IN CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL

How climate change denial works

Myrrdin, May 14, 2013 (AmericaBlog)

“…[In its Global Warming is Over story, the] Daily Mail attempted to claim (with the subsequent aid of Fox News, of course), that recent data proved that global warming had ended. Or, at best, Fox claimed, scientists were conflicted about whether global warming was still happening…[N]either claim was true…[The Daily Mail chose] a short-term period in which temperatures had cooled, and ignored the longer-term warming that has been happening…[S]ince the early 80s, even the cooling is warming…

“…[T]his graph from Skeptical Science [shows] how the climate change deniers manipulate the data. If you only look at a given 8 -year or so period, it looks like the temperature trend is downward. It isn’t until you look at all the data spanning the last 40 years that you realize the trend is quite clearly in the direction of global warming:..[T]he reporter was aware of the data from 1980 to 1996 that refutes his argument. But he chose to only show the data from 1997 to 2012.”

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“Looking at the complete data series shows why. It shows absolutely no hint of the alleged ‘plateau’ in temperatures…Temperatures were hotter in 1997-8 because of the El Niño event, which is a cyclic phenomena that causes temperatures to spike up. La Niña events have the opposite effect, causing temperatures to cool. So reporter Rose chose a year when El Niño caused temperatures to rise at the beginning of his ‘plateau’ and a La Niña event at the end.

But when you look at the past 62 years, even taking El Niño and La Niña events into account, it’s clear that the overall average global temperature is warming…It’s difficult to believe that the Daily Mail’s error happened by accident. Especially when the reporter talked to experts who made clear that the problem is long-term warming, not what may or may not happen in the short term (i.e., the difference between “weather” (short term) and “climate” (long term))…A “mistake” like this can only happen by searching through vast quantities of data, and then cherry-picking the data points that tell the story the propagandist wants to tell while ignoring all the rest…The real climate change hoax is being perpetrated by those who claim it never existed in the first place.”

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