On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:34:23 +0100, "Philip Eden"
philipATweatherHYPHENukDOTcom wrote:
"Scott W" wrote :
...the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction has come up
against an "inconvenient truth". Its research shows that since 1998
the average temperature of the planet has not risen, even though the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to
increase.
Come on guys ... you're not taken in by this crude manipulation,
are you? You don't identify a trend by picking the warmest
year on record (warm because of the rampant El Niņo occurring
at the time ... all El Niņo years are globally warm) and then comparing
that with subsequent years. If you select your start and finish points
you can prove anything.
And Dr Bellamy thinks he can get away with calling a graph of global
temperature "research" without being accused of being misleading.
Now that I can see what he's done, I thought I'd do a bit of my own
manipulation... err, calculation... to test Dr Bellamy's assertion.
So I went to the Hadley dataset:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm downloaded the
ascii file and calculated the mean global temperature anomaly for the
9 years up to and including the warmest year (1998) and for the 9
years since then (though 2007 is of course incomplete).
I did it this way to be as generous as possible to Dr Bellamy over the
relevant timescale (his choice, "since 1998" so about 9 years). The
result is not unexpected:
1990-1998 +0.230 deg C (includes the warmest year on record)
1999-2007 +0.409 deg C (2007 being incomplete).
Needless to say, if the quote is accurate, I am now somewhat sceptical
of his motives.
--
Dave