December 6, 2009

McIlheran proves warming seems to have halted

I've just completed P-Mac's journalism trick to ignore all of reality.

Having reviewed the scientific literature, ace reporter and right-wing climatologist guy Patrick McIlheran summarizes his findings:
[The Hadley Centre e-mails reveal] experts who wrote the doom narrative, discussing among themselves how to manipulate data to make observations fit their predictions. One telling message from the unit's head is about how to "hide the decline" in observed temperatures, as global warming seems to have halted about a decade ago, something their models are unable to explain.
Have any of these tedious wing-nuts bothered to find out what was meant by "hide the decline"? It was not a decline in "observed" temperature (temperature is measured, not observed).

Measured temperatures rose.*

The best:
Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius — in other words, a standstill.
Yes, the same Hadley Centre Patrick McIlheran just got done accusing of "hiding the decline in observed temperatures."

And yes, that is from McIlheran's own link to Der Spiegel. What's not so well hidden is the decline in the right-wing guy's credibility, which is less easy to measure,** but a constant amusement to observe.

 * Remarkably, McIlheran has since adopted the position that the question of whether temperatures are rising or not rising is simply "a subtlety" that he somehow overlooked. If you can believe that.

** Plus or minus 1.5 micrometers from zero.

4 comments:

Jay Bullock said...

One telling message from the unit's head is about how to "hide the decline" in observed temperatures, as global warming seems to have halted about a decade ago.
Wasn't the "hide the decline" email from 1998 or 1999? How prescient of Jones, et al., to "hide" a "decline" that hadn't even happened yet!

illusory tenant said...

Yes, exactly.

paulb said...

PZ posted this at his blog. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&feature=player_embedded

illusory tenant said...

Yeah that's good.

Alex Jones was new to me. What a hoot.