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Space/Science » in reply to A delphic approach to global cooling stats?

Re: Wow, they're getting a lot of mileage out of this.
TB — (archived)

As one article pointed out, the AP dropped 1998 off the 10-year data list, or the statistical "trend" would have been cooler.

But face it, there's no such thing as a long-term climate trend based on ten years of ANY data. Heck, if you look at the big picture, fifty years isn't that reliable either.

Nobody sensible thinks that the past ten years means the world is going to cool off from now on, which is the strawman in the AP article. However, it does mean that it hasn't been getting warmer lately, despite the theories and models that insist that it should be. None of those models predicted the current "lull" in the warming trend, and they're coming up with all sorts of explanations to cover this problem.

Now, it's pretty much the "conventional wisdom" that all the climate crap is going to hit the fan - in maybe 20 years.

Wait for it!

The major mistake, I think, was overselling the panic in the early days, with predictions of imminent floods and planetary disasters (Al Gore comes to mind). Remember, the temperature increase over the past century has been about 1 degree Centigrade.

And frankly, civilization would do a lot better with a warming trend than if we did cool back down to another ice age.

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