Hadley Cherry Pick

Not entirely sure what to make of this. The UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, about to be forced to plot 0.313 as the annual temperature for 2008, rearranged their site and posted several pages on why this doesn’t mean global warming has stopped. Which is all fair enough; we can expect temporary anomalies to a trend.

What’s more interesting is the reluctance to just post the values along with the previous ones.  They’ve not included it on the standard chart though it’s labelled up to 2008.

Where it is, it is only ‘provisional’.

So apparently, it’s fine to publish values as long as they fit but as soon as the facts contradict a simplistic view, it’s best to smother it rather than just explain it.

Worse, they freely admit that they were happy to run smoothing that showed false rises in March 2007, but are suddenly reluctant to use the same when it shows a drop. Apparently it’s fine to be misleading if some people need convincing, but it’s wrong to be misleading if some people… need convincing.

Cherry picking interpretation methods to fit a theory is no better than cherry picking your data.  But they do still publish the data.

The Warmest Years

The results are in on the show that everyone’s breathlessly waiting for; and 2008 comes in at the coldest for nearly a decade:

It’s true – and worded very carefully. ‘Nearly a decade’ sounds nearly like a decade. ‘Coldest’ is relative but it sounds cool.

Yet despite this evidence – from the UK’s Hadley center no less – and the clear straight line drawn through the cherry picked data in the best traditions of the GW deluders – some people still argue that global warming ‘is’ happening. With quite startling irony, given the continuous bleat that ‘deniers’ refuse to see the evidence presented.

The repeated support for ‘current warming’ appears to be that recent years are the warmest in industrial history which, while it might tell us something about the history of temperature, tells us nothing about what ‘is’ happening. And it leads to incautious comments such as “the span from 1998 to 2008 has seen global warming at a pace unprecedented in the age of humankind.”

When I leave the pub, a little tipsy, I start sobering up – somewhat, with occasional swigs from a hipflask on my long way home. Despite this slowly increasing sobriety, my blood alcohol rates are still the highest they’ve been all day. Yet the GW enthusiasts would keep reminding us of the impending alcohol poisoning by pointing out that we are more drunk than a few hours before.

It’s particularly strange as there are plenty of valid supporting arguments. For example the minimum earlier in 2008 is higher than previous minimums. We might argue that the sun’s unexpectedly ‘low’ output is over-compensating for the increased CO2 forcing; at least we can point to some evidence that might support if squinted at right. We could pick from various model ’scenarios’ and factors to remove from the measurements to show that our models are right after all and that – in retrospect – we expected this.

Mainly, we should just state that the ‘recent’ trend is simply not long enough or large enough to have anything to do with a long term trend.

But for the moment, anyone who claims the globe is warming can be given a very special label: a deluding denier.

(Edit: Hadley have changed their pages around, losing the easy access to the above data. It would be easy to say that, given it was when they were really going to have to post the 2008 data, they didn’t want to put anything that might be ‘misused‘. So they did. And so do I. They still seem reluctant to put 2008 on their graphs)