Here’s the Secret Data Climate Scientists Are Hiding From Us

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For years, the more dimwitted of the climate denialists have been yammering on about a pause in global warming. This is not based on the measurements and models that even some climate scientists are puzzled about. It’s based on using a chart that begins in 1998, which was an unusually warm El Niño year. By using a very warm starting point and a more ordinary ending point, they make it look like nothing much has been going on for over a decade.

It’s all nonsense. But two can play at that game. Last year was quite warm, and this year is warmer still. From the New York Times: “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American agency that tracks worldwide temperatures, announced Wednesday that last month had been the hottest September on record, and that the January-to-September period had also been the hottest since 1880. Scientists say it is now all but certain that the full year will be the hottest on record, too.”

Hmmm. 2008 was a bit of an outlier on the cool side. So I think I’ll start there and end in 2015. Handily for me, NOAA now has a nice interactive tool that allows me to chart any period I want and even calculates the trend line for me. This generated the chart on the right. Naturally, I changed the y-axis to Fahrenheit in order to produce bigger, more dramatic numbers. Oh, and I started the y-axis at 0.8 °F instead of zero, because that produces a steeper, more apocalyptic trend line.

So there you have it. Proof positive that global temperatures are skyrocketing at a pace of 0.58 degrees per decade. This is the news that climate “scientists” in the pay of Big Fossil have been hiding from us. If you can’t trust a chart based directly on NOAA data, what can you trust?

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