Denialist shenanigans

David Rose in the Mail on Sunday, a sister publication to The Daily Mail, once again makes hysterical accusations that the temperature record has been falsified and billions wasted, which turn out to be false. Again.

From Victor Venema's Variable Variability blog:

You can see this "pause" in the graph below of the global mean temperature. Can you find it? Well you have to think those last two years away and then start the period exactly in that large temperature peak you see in 1998. It is not actually a thing, it is a consequence of cherry picking a period to get a politically convenient answer (for David Rose's pay masters).

(Source)

In fact, as Venema points out, since 1880 global temperatures, as measured without adjustment have risen by more than with adjustment.

(Source)

Rose's most obvious--and silly--mistake was to say that NOAA's temperature record is consistently higher than HadCrut's, which proves they're biased.  Well, no.  Each institution calculates their anomaly data relative to different base periods, HadCrut relative to 1960-1990, while NOAA does theirs relative to 1900-2000, which includes the much colder period in the first half of the century.

This is the chart Rose published:

(Source)

And this is what that chart looks like when calculated off the same base period:

(Source)

Climate change denialists have been driven on the defensive because of three successively higher record global temperatures in a row.  Rational people would admit they were wrong, and accept the reality of climate change.  But this does not suit coal and oil interests, nor the denialists who have invested so much in claiming that CO2 is good and the world isn't warming.  The longer they can delay the switch to green energy, the longer their businesses remain viable and their incomes high.  And I include denialists in that, because I don't believe anyone could now logically deny the reality of global warming without being in the pay of those whose interests are served by the continued use of fossil fuels.

[Read more here, and here]