I read an editorial in the Washington Post written by Charles Krauthammer.
In the article, Krauthammer claims: "Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years..."
Isn't this BS, or have I been living a lie? Hasn't the global temperatures been slowly rising over the last 16 years?
Here is a link to the article, if you're interested: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-obamas-global-warming-folly/2013/07/04/a51c4ed0-e3fc-11e2-a11e-c2ea876a8f30_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
For global records, 2010 is the hottest year on record, tied with 2005.
No, it hasn't been cooling since 1998. Even if we ignore long term trends and just look at the record-breakers, that wasn't the hottest year ever. Different reports show that, overall, 2005 was hotter than 1998. What's more, globally, the hottest 12-month period ever recorded was from June 2009 to May 2010.
Though humans love record-breakers, they don't, on their own, tell us a much about trends -- and it's trends that matter when monitoring Climate Change. Trends only appear by looking at all the data, globally, and taking into account other variables -- like the effects of the El Nino ocean current or sunspot activity -- not by cherry-picking single points.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm
The planet has continued to accumulate heat since 1998 - global warming is still happening. Nevertheless, surface temperatures show much internal variability due to heat exchange between the ocean and atmosphere. 1998 was an unusually hot year due to a strong El Nino.
To claim global warming stopped in 1998 overlooks one simple physical reality - the land and atmosphere are just a small fraction of the Earth's climate (albeit the part we inhabit). The entire planet is accumulating heat due to an energy imbalance. The atmosphere is warming. Oceans are accumulating energy. Land absorbs energy and ice absorbs heat to melt. To get the full picture on global warming, you need to view the Earth's entire heat content.
This analysis is performed in An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950 (Murphy 2009) which adds up heat content from the ocean, atmosphere, land and ice. To calculate the Earth's total heat content, the authors used data of ocean heat content from the upper 700 metres. They included heat content from deeper waters down to 3000 metres depth. They computed atmospheric heat content using the surface temperature record and the heat capacity of the troposphere. Land and ice heat content (the energy required to melt ice) were also included.
see http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/25/2061891/trenberth-global-warming-is-here-to-stay-whichever-way-you-look-at-it/
and http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/06/2252281/media-still-overlooks-90-of-global-warming-washington-post-still-wont-fact-check-colummnists/
Some charts from those two articles:
While the overall warming is about 0.16°C per decade, there are three ten-year periods where there was a hiatus in warming, as the graph above shows, from 1977 to 1986, from 1987 to 1996, and from 2001 to 2012. But at each end of these periods there were big jumps. We find exactly the same sort of flat periods in climate model projections, lasting easily up to 15 years in length.
Decadal global combined surface-air temperature via World Meteorological Organization
Figure 1: Land, atmosphere, and ice heating (red), 0-700 meter OHC increase (light blue), 700-2,000 meter OHC increase (dark blue). From Nuccitelli et al. (2012).
He tries to claim (falsely) that 1998 was the hottest year ever recorded. As Hatrack pointed out above me, 2010 beat that record. He then tries to draw a straight line from 1998 to the present day and call that "global cooling".
Second, 1998 was an EXCEPTIONALLY hot year due to an incredibly powerful El Nino event. It was such an amazing outlier that it stands out on a chart to anyone who's taken even a freshman-level statistics class. This makes it much harder to use in future predictions of expected patterns, as we see with Krauthammer's erroneous claims.
For example, look at this chart:
Based on Krauthammer's logic, we could say global warming stopped from 1880-1940, the stopped again from 1940-1980 as well due to a misguided use of a few really hot outlier years. Clearly this isn't true based on the long-term trend visible in the chart, but it's the argument he's making.
