Playing to the ignorant or actually that ignorant?

[Shadowdweller]

Here's yet another little slice of drooling idiocy floating through the blogosphere that several posters on these very boards (even in this very thread) seem to be unable to discern:

A theory that correlates for 40 years and then fails for 15 yrs is not the sort that anyone should use as an argument to revise the planet's economies.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-row-admits-data-organised.html#ixzz0fWRsdTRR

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...st-admits-no-warming-since-1995-84337497.html



All of the above refer to a BBC interview of Phil Jones, director of Climate Research Unit at UEA. A transcript of which may be found here

The pertinent section would be:

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

Jones, of course, is saying that the time frame is too short compared to measured difference in average temperatures to produce conclusive results, not that warming has suddenly and mysteriously ceased. A point which, as usual, is either lost upon or deliberately ignored by the illiterate denialist hordes. It is particularly amusing to see how Beck attempts to spin the answers.

 

[leftysergeant]

Five freaking years, during which oil prices have risen so that Americans have been forced to use less of it, and during which our demand for exotic hardwoods has declioned, making it less profitable to logged old groth rain forests, and during which the sun may be putting out less energy as it goes trhrough a regular cycle does NOT, in any way, mean that AGW is BS.

The interval from one El Nino event to the next is longer than that.

Only to non-scientists is the five-year trend much of interest.