Chart of the Day

As Anthony Watts reports, the National Climate Data Center--part of the Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also home of the National Weather Service)--now has data on U.S. temperatures updated through year-end 2008. The website now permits users to generate graphs. After rising over most decade-long periods in the past 60 years (image), the new numbers confirm a recent cooling trend:



source: NCDC

Starting at 1999 isn't arbitrary: as Luboš Motl notes, 1998 was a "famously warm El Nino year," inclusion of which could obscure long-term trends. Motl continues:

But even if you begin with a cooler La Nina year 1999, as I did, you obtain a cooling trend in the average U.S. temperatures during the last 10 years. Because some infrequent readers may have problems to interpret these words, let me emphasize that this cooling means that there has been no warming in the U.S. for 10 years.

I am (and the data are) not only questioning the heavenly huge, urgent, catastrophically accelerating, and global eco-socialism demanding rate of global warming but the very existence of global warming and the sanity of all people who believe this myth.

In fact, there has been a cooling, and a rather fast one that would subtract 2.7 °C per century if it continued by the same rate (and it surely won't).

Furthermore, this cooling cannot really be explained by ENSO dynamics (El Nino and La Nina episodes) because the ENSO episodes are distributed pretty much symmetrically in the last decade. This 10-year period began with a La Nina and it ended with a La Nina.

Now, indeed, other continents would lead to different conclusions. But let me mention that these conclusions wouldn't be radically different and moreover, 90% of Americans don't care about the temperatures anywhere outside the U.S.

There's been a cooling in the last 10 years which means that even if there exists an underlying warming trend, it will take many decades before this warming emerges out of the "noise" that we must assume to exist in order to avoid a direct falsification of the global warming hypothesis by the evidence above.

The Baltimore Examiner wonders:

The "scientific consensus" that Al Gore and his fellow global warming alarmists rely upon to force radical changes in how Americans live and work is being unraveled by Mother Nature. . .

"For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?" asked David Gee, chairman of the 2008 International Geological Congress' science committee.

That's an excellent question for President-elect Barack Obama, who promised mandatory caps on carbon emissions and a new international global warming treaty. After meeting with Gore recently, Obama proclaimed: "The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over. We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years."

Which scientists? Does Obama believe more than 650 current and former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who are now publicly questioning the non-scientist Gore's major premise? Or Norwegian Nobel physicist Ivar Giaever, who declared himself a global warming skeptic, as did Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology? Or the scientists who point out that "100 percent" of the 20th century global warming signal comes from man-made "adjustments" made to a computer model at NASA's Goddard Institute?

There is no scientific consensus that human activity is causing global warming. The IPCC's own climate change models predicted rising temperatures for this year, but those actually recorded fall short of the predictions.

See also Bjørn Lomborg's advice for Obama.

(via Planet Gore, twice)