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Jim Manzi defends George Will: “There has not been a lot of measured warming for the last ten years.”  But that’s just not true.  A fifth of a degree in the trendline is still a fifth of a degree in the trendline, even if you post a chart that uses a shorter timespan and displays the results by month instead of by year.

Now, it is true that the single year 2008 was cooler than the single year 1998.  It’s also true that there hasn’t been much warming over the past six years.  Noisy data can usually provide any answer you want if you cherry pick it well enough.  But neither of these things is the same as demonstrating that there’s been no warming during the past decade.  There has been.  About a fifth of a degree.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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