Waiting for Global Cooling: Robert Fawcett and David Jones

There is very little justification for asserting that global warming has gone away over the past ten years, not least because the linear trend in globally-averaged annual mean temperatures (the standard yardstick) over the period 1998-2007 remains upward. While 1998 was the world’s warmest year in the surface-based instrumental record up to that point in time, 2005 was equally warm and in some data sets surpassed 1998. A substantial contribution to the record warmth of 1998 came from the very strong El Niño of 1997/98 and, when the annual data are adjusted for this short-term effect (to take out El Niño’s warming influence), the warming trend is even more obvious.

from Waiting for Global Cooling by Fawcett and Jones

Because of the year-to-year variations in globally-averaged annual mean temperatures, about ten years are required for an underlying trend to emerge from the “noise” of those year-toyear fluctuations. Hence, the fact that 2006 and 2007 were cooler than 2005, is nowhere near enough data to clearly establish a cooling trend.

"Global warming stopped in 1998. Global temperatures have remained static since then, in spite of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Global temperatures have cooled since 1998. Because 2006 and 2007 were cooler than 2005, a global cooling trend has established itself."

All these statements, and variations on them, have been confidently asserted in the international and Australian media in the past year or so, but the data do not support them.

Read more here: http://www.aussmc.org/documents/waiting-for-global-cooling.pdf

Article via Luke Walker. Thanks.

----------------
Keywords: National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, April 2008, David Jones, Robert Fawcett, warming, cooling, global temperatures, Australian Science Media Centre.