Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Another wheel falls off the climate skeptic bus

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Most of you have probably heard climate skeptics suggest that there is no climate warming because temperatures in the last decade have seemed to cool (examples at BBC and Drudge).

In the news today, the Associated Press asked a group of independent statisticians to evaluate the temperature records to see what they thought.

The answer?

The skeptics are wrong—warming is real, and it’s statistically hotter than at any point since records began.

Some excerpts:

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a microtrend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Yet the idea that things are cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, a BBC news story posted on the Drudge Report and in a new book by the authors of the best-seller “Freakonomics.” Last week, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent of Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.

Real Climate had a post recently about the cottage industry that built climate change denial.

Here’s the new Pew poll that everyone is talking about.

This is a short review of a book describing the climate denial industry.

And here is a website dedicated to confronting climate change denial.