“Union of Concerned Scientists – Unwarranted Concern about the Northeast US“. A guest post by Alan Cheetham of Appinsys (an unskeptical version of Skeptical Science, with an interest in portraits of Mohammed). Did you know that the Union of Concerned Scientists, who are just washed-out librul anti-nuke gravy-train types, has been exaggerating climate change in the Northeastern USA? (Nothing to say about the rest of the world?)
[Across the globe, and] “here in the Northeast, the climate is changing. Records show that spring is arriving earlier, summers are growing hotter, and winters are becoming warmer and less snowy. These changes are consistent with global warming, an urgent phenomenon driven by heat-trapping emissions from human activities.” – 2006, from climatechoices.org
“In fact”, there has been no trend in temperature change there in a hundred years, and sometimes the “record” was, like, years ago!
Cheat-sheet:
- When denialists like Anthony Watts and Alan Cheetham want to present the illusion of a recent cooling period, they will reduce the number of years of temperature data until they can.
- When denialists like Anthony and Alan want to hide recent (post 1975) AGW warming, they increase the number of years they present.
- Denialists like Anthony and Alan will always cherry-pick a convenient location and claim that it disproves a global trend.
- Denialists like Anthony and Alan will always fixate on an outlier if it suits their argument, the wilder the better.
Unfortunately for Anthony, in this case the “trick” is in plain sight. In all “flat” temperature graphs the trend from 1975 onwards is a rising one. Here’s an example, the “summer” temperature trend:
Alan Cheetham's "flat" temperature trend — of just the northeast USA because nothing else exists — with post-1975 trend indicated.
I guess we should listen to the Union of Unconcerned Scientists.
Wott's Up With That? 
What’s the underlying data for that chart? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. And it really does seem to be noisy, but mostly no big movements. Are they on the up and up?
[According to the post, the data is from NOAA’s Northeastern dataset. The more “local” the more noisy the appearance. Simply switching to the National dataset magically restores the trend. – Ben]
Looks like it gets noisier in the last 30 years too
So. You have to cherry pick 1975 in order to prove Anthony wrong.
You are an idiot…
[So… You don’t understand that Alan cherry-picked a region, a season, and a time span and you think I’m the idiot. Here’s the plot produced by the same program, encompassing the “Contiguous United States”. Update: the NCDC doesn’t seem to keep the output online. Here’s a link to a screen capture generated from this page. – Ben]
Um… isn’t the rising trend between 1920 and 1950 much steeper? Why aren’t we worrying about that?
Yes I was also wondering what line Ben would have drawn if the date was 1950 and we were looking at the trend for the “last 30 years”. I think it is fair enuf comment to also lay the cherry picking label fairly and squarely at this rebuttal.
[So you and “Dodgy” have decided to fixate on an outlier in a small region and hope the discussion doesn’t shift back to national, or even god forbid, global trends. Are either of you going to explain how the pre-1950 time period is relevant or are you both just going to sputter “numbers!” You know why 1975 is relevant, don’t you? That’s when the warming trend could no longer be attributed to natural causes. – Ben]