Ex quolibet quodlibet

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Ex quolibet quodlibet. Intl. J. Inact., 1:83–85

First, a public service announcement: Crash an online poll today!

I’ve been waiting a while for the High Respectable Climate Change Inactionosphere (the H₁ folks) to come up with another ’scientific’ talking point. Well, it seems they were waiting for James Hansen to give a speech on the 20th anniversary of his global warming testimony, before lashing out at him. In any case, this means that I now get the chance to draw some spiffy sciencey-looking graphs. Woohoo!

Step 1: d’Aleo ‘proves’ stuff using HadCRUT et al.

So what happened anyway? We start with a write-up by inactivist Joe d’Aleo on 18 Jun, in which he used data from HadCRUT¹ and UAH² and others to ’show’ that there’s a global cooling trend. After ignoring all the data before 2002, that is.

Step 2: d’Aleo dumps HadCRUT

After Hansen’s speech calling for prompt action on global warming, d’Aleo and his pals decide they have show the world the Truth — that the earth is in fact cooling! This time, our inactivist friends decide to employ a, um, different method:

• They use data starting from 1988, instead of 2002, no doubt as a cheap potshot at Hansen’s initial testimony.
• Instead of using some sort of regression method to obtain the long term trend, they simply draw a straight line between the May 1988 and May 2008 data points. Genius!
• They use only UAH data. Unfortunately, the HadCRUT data don’t support the ‘global cooling’ claim — even with the above two wacky steps — so they must be consigned to the memory hole. For now.

Step 3: Wheee!

So there you have it: the best climate science you can get, obtained using the most rigorous, consistent, and impartial methodology ever known to man. What’s not to like?

Footnotes

1. The UK Hadley Centre + University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit global temperature anomaly data. A separate description of the data format is available.
2. The University of Alabama at Huntsville global temperature anomaly data.

Update 2008-06-27: Turns out that Watts’s online poll’s just as rigorous as d’Aleo’s ’science’.