Wash. Post: In Capitol Hill’s climate skeptics corner, time stands still
Oh, sigh. The Post‘s David A. Fahrenthold (a byline that nudges the non-metric American brain right off to think temperature) reports this week on the continued hold that rejection of anthropogenic climate change has on some of the nation’s senior elected representatives. As it is a political story, not a report from the halls of science where people have actual advanced degrees in this stuff, it is justly balanced with opinions from both sides. Some of the usual suspects come up.
The piece is a good explainer of the Congressional shoals the rather feeble carbon emission cap and trade bill may hit as it plows along.
But, one would like to have read a single sentence “other side” response, from that commodity known as data, to the assertion by the Republican party’s national committee chairman that “We’re cooling. We’re not warming.” Another and perhaps more usual version of this, which has caught on and spread among the rejectionists like swine flu through an orphanage, is that global warming stopped ten years ago. The Tracker has squinted and tilted his head at the tables of data, as from the one above from NASA’s Goddard Inst. for Space Studies (ones from NOAA and from Britain’s MET Office aren’t much different). It’s impossible to see a cooling for ten years. Sure, it jags up and down and 2008 was the coolest year on record since way back in 2000 and we’ve had two straight years that were less hot than the previous. But one doesn’t need a sophisticated statistical analysis to see that the scale and nature of such variations lately is right in line with the whole plot’s irregularities, and the trend remains. Moreover, the average of just the last three years is tied with the previous three as warmest on record. 2005 is the warmest single year EVER (second warmest to 1998 in some data sets). It might take a nose dive, one supposes. To bet the house on it doing so appears foolish. And it seems from here that only the aggressively ignorant can honestly assert that it has already done so.
Easy forecast: confusion between preference and likelihood will continue….
Pic hi res ;
-CP
