Statisticians confirm: no global cooling despite skeptic spin

In case the denialists’ unfounded claims confused you.

In a massive blow to the climate skeptic movement, the Associated Press has conducted a blind test of statisticians that unequivocally confirms that no global cooling trend exists.

Despite the best efforts of a small handful of climate skeptics, who argue that the globe has cooled rather than warmed since the record hot year of 1998, no such cooling trend has taken place.

The Associated Press conducted the blind test by sending global temperature data from NOAA and NASA to four independent statisticians who were not told what the data represented, but simply asked to perform a common statistical analysis to look for trends in the data.
The statisticians “found no true temperature declines over time,” and in fact identified “a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers,” the AP reports.

Several statisticians quoted in the AP piece slam the climate skeptics who “cherry-pick” data in a “particularly suspect” attempt to denounce global warming.  Efforts to portray a global cooling trend since the record hot year of 1998 are “not scientifically legitimate,” and are the result of "people coming at the data with preconceived notions," according to David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor who analyzed the data for AP.

"To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous," said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford. …

Statisticians Confirm: No Global Cooling Despite Skeptic Spin

Technorati Tags: global warming,climate change