More from the Science board

Well that is hardly surprising at the culmination of a period of warming, is it?

The matter of interest remains the CAUSE of the measured warming.

I'm really surprised to see that David's "ten year moving average" manages to get as far as 2011.
Please explain how this trick is achieved, visitor.
Would not a ten year moving average for 2011 require data from c 2006 to c 2016?

In that case, 2005 alone would explain any perceptible increase, wouldn't it? And what is that increase? Less than a tenth of a degree! A variation that we have already seen exceeded on the opposite side of the supposed average baseline (derived how? Extending how far back? Not to the holocene or even the medieval warm period, I'll bet.

Well, I admit I don't fully understand it either. What I would say, however, is that it appears to show that temperature is rising based on the past ten years average change - the past forty or so years, indeed. And that the orange line at least indicates this rise is accelerating. But no one has ever disputed that the global temperature has been in a warming cycle for the past forty years, have they? The issue is whether superimposed on that entirely natural cycle - predictable and now well understood to be caused ultimately by solar output and solar system CoG movement - is a catastrophe-inducing rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

We don't yet know that - even the IPCC admits that there is no evidence showing there is such a superimposition. If the warming cycle continues beyond its expected 40-50 year length, then this would be worrying evidence that something non-natural was occurring. The indications so far as that the rise in temperature is decelerating, to say the least.

I'd like to see this graph extended back - even three hudred years, say, back to the Little Ice Age. I strongly expect the much larger variations we'd see at regular intervals would give a far less alarming picture, both because the recent cycle of warming would be clearly well within the regular natural variation range, and because we'd immediately be led to induce that this warming cycle is about to be replaced by its regularly subsequent cooling one. Does such an extrapolated graph exist?

This blink comparator shows how GISS (headed by James Hansen, who else?) has fiddled with its own data
over the years - lowering older temperatures and increasing later ones in order to show a more extreme rising trend.
Of course, this is just USA data but you get my drift?

The following figures show a more recent example of the GISS re-adjustment of data
(from: Bob Tisdale at i44.tinypic.com/29dwsj7.gif).
The 2000 and 2009 versions of the GISTEMP data are compared. This shows the additional artificial warming trend
created through data adjustments.




Since 2000, NASA has further “cleaned” the historical record. The following graph shows the further warming adjustments
made to the data in 2005.
(The data can be downloaded at data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/US_USHCN.2005vs1999.txt;
the following graph is from www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/print.html).
This figure plots the difference between the 2000 adjusted data and the 2005 adjusted data.
Although the 2000 to 2005 adjustment differences are not as large as the 1999 to 2000 adjustment
differences shown above, they add additional warming to the trend throughout the historical record.

Since when? You have to specify the period, visitor.

If you mean has it been warming since the Holocene climate maximum (or Thermal Optimum
as it used to be called pre IPCC) the answer is, no, it has been cooling.

If you mean since the Little Ice Age the answer is yes it has been warming.

Do we know why? No. I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of observed warming is due to
anthropogenic effects and anyway the variability is well within known natural climate variability.

A warmer world is a better world. Do you want to go back to the Little Ice Age
when people starved and plagues decimated the population?