Hey Everybody! It’s Another Global Cooling Report!

I’m sure this one, unlike the last one and the one before that is for really real this time. Really. This one even made Digg, Drudge, Faux Noise, etc, etc… meaning it’s totally got legs for absolutely certain this time. Right?

The article in question openly admits that they’ve had nothing but anecdotal evidence to support their “Global Cooling” hypothesis for the last few months, but then tries to lay claim to some hard scientific evidence with the fact that there was a sudden global temperature drop in January. From this fact, they make a claim that is pretty bizarre:

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time.

Uh…??? The meteorologist and AGW Skeptic, Anthony Watts, who brought attention to this unusual, sudden temperature drop with a collection of charts surveying four sources, takes issue with this claim:

There has been no “erasure”. This is an anomaly with a large magnitude, and it coincides with other anecdotal weather evidence. It is curious, it is unusual, it is large, it is unexpected, but it does not “erase” anything. (Emphasis mine.)

DailyTech’s statement is completely nonsensical, and something only a dittohead could uncritically swallow. While I disagree strongly with his methods and reasoning, I do appreciate Anthony Watts’ urging his commenters “Don’t rush Science,” when they try to make some unsupportable leaps of logic to their conclusions.

Thirteen-Month Global Temperature Drop (Red Line Added to show the Mean)

Where I take issue with Watts, is in his repeatedly saying “12 month period,” when he is, in fact, referring to a 13 month period. February 2007 to January 2008 would be 12 months, and would have returned a slightly less dramatic delta. This is important, because Watts has moved the field goals by one month to score a bigger talking point, but is framing it as a year to match the real science.

As we can see on all the charts he provides, January 2007 was an unusually warm peak in global temperature and January 2008 was an unusually cold drop (although still above the mean). He then subtracts the extreme low from the extreme high, and… Voila! A global temperature drop.

So… big whoop. There are highs and lows all over the chart, I could subtract any of the lower temperatures following 1998’s peak and claim a global temperature drop. Would that mean a Global Cooling trend, as the dittoheads (Not Watts) are claiming? No. That would just be more anecdotal evidence. The dittoheads are cherry-picking data out of the larger trend to support their claims.

And what is that trend? Even the briefest glance at HadCRUT’s, NASA’s, UAH’s, and RSS’s hard data plainly illustrates the trend, a steady, gradual increase in temperatures. Not anecdotal evidence from comparing two Januaries, but a trend encompassing more than a century of measurements in some cases.

Even with a dramatic temperature drop over 13 months, 2007-plus-Jan08 is still an above average warm 13 month period. According to NASA’s GISS, 2007 tied for second warmest year on record, and according to the NOAA, 2007 was the fifth warmest worldwide, but then, they didn’t include January 2008, did they?

Trend VS Anecdotal Evidence

Phil Plait, the Daily Kos, Misanthropic Principle, Climate Progress, and others have all posted responses to this latest bit of pure rhetoric, but I thought it important to throw my own critical explanation for why this latest dittohead attempt to subvert science was so disingenuous.

The good news is that the Main-Stream Media wasn’t fooled for a second, which, of course, the Dittoheads took as evidence further validating their position, because we all know newspapers, news broadcasts, wikipedia, books, and scientists are all part of a vast librul conspiracy.

I wish the “liberal” media was this sloppy and illogical, then they’d link to my blog as a reference. Maybe I should switch sides and blogwhore myself out to the dittoheads. It can’t be that difficult. Lobotomies are still legal, right?