Flatly wrong global warming denial

Sometimes climate change deniers make it all too easy.

The UK paper Daily Mail has a long history of courting climate change denial, and apparently it has no wish to change. It recently posted an atrocious article called "Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it". The article was written by David Rose, who wrote a pretty inaccurate article earlier this year on a similar topic.

In fact, this new article was so blatantly wrong that the MET office - the national weather service for the UK - wrote a rebuttal to it detailing the flaws. To start with, they point out they did recently update their global temperature databases, but that's a very different thing than "quietly releasing a report", as Rose claims. Cue the conspiracy music!

It gets worse from there. They take on his points one at a time and take them down. I highly recommend reading them. And if you haven't gotten your fill of it, or you're still not convinced, you can check out The Carbon Brief's article that gives more details on Rose's denial.

Or you can read the takedown by Skeptical Science.

Or by Open Mind. In fact, let's take a closer look at that.

Tamino, the author of Open Mind, shows just how Rose picks and chooses his data to make it look like global warming stopped years ago. In the picture here, the top graph shows what Rose says the temperature looks like: flat across the past 15 years or so. But that's terribly misleading: the starting point he chose falsely makes the graph look flat. The bottom one shows the true situation as Tamino describes it. You have to go farther into the past to find a reasonable starting point, and when you do, you see what looked flat is actually a rising temperature over time.

To do what Rose did in that upper graph is to strain reality (and credulity) past the breaking point. It's almost as if Rose specifically chose the data that he liked and rejected the rest. That's a big no-no in the reality-based world. Tamino thoroughly vaporizes Rose's article, showing that it's wrong in its most basic assumptions, its methodology, and its conclusions.

But other than that...

This article is just another in a long line of climate change denials that fiddles with the data to make it look like the Earth isn't warming up. But it adds up. This kind of nonsense is damaging to real efforts to do something real about a real problem. And venues like the Daily Mail are all too happy to fan the fire while the world burns.

Related Posts:

- The US Congress Anti-Science Committee
- Republican candidates, global warming, evolution, and reality
- Is it hot in here, or is it just global warming?
- Let those global warming dollars flow