Comment to Chris Booker, Telegraph

To Chris (and the other global warming deniers at the Telegraph)

You are either liars or stupid.

You say that global temperatures have started to drop since 1998. They have not. The trend since 1998 has continued an upward trend with roughly the same gradient as it did since 1941. Taking the data from 1941 to present, and drawing a line of best fit shows the temperature to be increasing at the rate of 0.01 deg C per year. Taking the data from 1998 to today and again drawing a line of best fit, shows the temperature to be increasing at the rate of 0.013 deg C per year, i.e. the rate of increase is increasing, not decreasing as Chris claims.

What Chris is stupid enough to do, is to mix up correlation with trends. By taking the 1998 as a start point, he starts that period with a year that was exceptionally hot due to a severe El Nino. He then compares every other year against 1998 and ignores all the data in between. The effect of 1998 on the data set taken from that date to today simply reduces the correlation.

The rapid rise in temperature in 1998 during the El Nino shows how sensitive our climate is to perturbation. It should be seen as a warning of the risks we face, not an opportunity for imbeciles to distort the science further.

Chris’s basic argument that scientists don’t know what they are talking about when predicting climate change is a bit rich from someone who does not understand basic school boy statistics.

The temperature trends follow below:

 Data source for graphs, NASA