"Climate is cooling according to Jones

The Global Warming™ cultists are grabbing at any straw they can now.  Man-made global warming has been exposed as the fraud it always was.

The end (/start depending on which way you look at it) date isn't being cherry picked in this case though, it's just being taken from today/the most recent year which is what is typically done, so that means the only variable available for cherry picking is how long a period you look at, and the longer the period, the reduced likelihood of such cherry picking having a dramatic impact. That is, once you're looking at more than a 10 year period the effect of an additional year on the overall result will be reduced, thus limiting any attempts at cherry picking.

If say in the last 5-20 years (depending on the period being looked at) the only point at which there wasn't statistically significant warming was over a 15 year period then I could see the argument for cherry picking, but I doubt that is the case (I could be wrong, but I find it so hard finding climate figures from raw data that I can interpret next to impossible - I don't quite understand how I can find within a few seconds various graphs detailing the CO2 emissions per person by country and year, yet it's not easy to find a simple graph showing the average temperature per country per year. Then again it might just be that my searching methods aren't up to scratch)

Yep, it probably would not be easy since....

“In a January 29 report, they find that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Yes, that's right. They began eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures and drove up the average measured temperature. The eliminated stations had been in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea, as well as more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.”

Since you don't bother to provide any reference to this unnamed report I guess I'll have to do it for you.

The 111 page report itself is Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? by Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts, both infamous deniers with documented ties to ExxonMobil and whose expertise is pretty much limited to having been TV weathermen. Of course this is not a peer reviewed article nor would any reputable journal publish such drivel.

You can find the specific quote referenced all over the internet at literally hundreds of denier sites but the original is from Fox News (surprise, surprise), The Next Climate-gate?.

However if you wish to at least pretend to have an open mind you should read The IPCC vs. Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts.

The following are but a few excerpts.

Meanwhile, lest we get the impression that the IPCC is the source of all, or even most, errors, a contrarian document has conveniently been published online.  It's called "Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?" (pdf here) and it's by Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts.  A reader asked me to comment on it.  It turns out to represent a refreshing change from the IPCC reports.  While it's necessary to dig and dig to find errors in the IPCC reports, the errors in what I'll call STR are right there on the surface, easy to spot.  Here's a sampling:

In paragraph 3, STR states: "First, there is a major station dropout and increase in missing data in stations that remained which occurred suddenly around 1990; about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles. A clear bias was found towards removing cooler higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations during this culling process though leaving their data in the base periods from which ‘averages’ and anomalies are computed."

But as the National Climatic Data Center has explained, there was no such culling process. Instead, the simple, non-sinister explanation is that some data sets are easily available electronically and some are not, and the more recent global data archived by NCDC only consists of the most easily accessible data streams. D'Aleo knows this; it's even quoted in his Icecap blog!  Incredibly, on page 60 he later refers to it as the "unexplained major station dropout" while nowhere in STR does he deign to mention that NOAA has offered a (logical) explanation.

In paragraph 10: "Calculating the average temperatures this way would ensure that the mean global surface temperature for each month and year would show a false-positive temperature anomaly – a bogus warming. This method would also ensure that the trend in the temperature change would be enhanced beyond the natural 60-year climate cycles."

D'Aleo and Watts are saying that because predominantly only warm stations are available in the data set in recent years, the temperature anomalies will be falsely positive and show a bogus warming. Their logic is absolutely wrong, and all major global temperature compilations (NCDC, GISS, and CRUTEM3) are calculated in such a way that a loss of stations like this doesn't bias the anomaly estimates.

The article goes on to explain precisely why their logic is absolutely wrong along with a few more examples of their errors but given that the "report" is just recently "published" there's sure to be more definitive shredding of this so-called work within the next few months. However given how the denialsphere works we can look forward to this same garbage being regurgitated years later, long after everyone already knows it's just a bunch of crap, just so that it may confuse the one or two people left that haven't already heard about it.

But it does mean that it is much more likely to be a better measure, because of the reduced variation - if I was to take a random 7 period trend and a random 15 year trend and extrapolate that over say 20-30 years the 15 year period would be most likely to give the more accurate estimate.

Looking at that graph though they could have also gone to 90-91 and possibly achieved a similar result, making the cherry picking charge carry much less weight than if it was the sole year that could've been used. Thanks for providing the graph though.

Alright I guess I'm more interested in the (weather) temperature in each country each year then, since that seems of more relevance as the effects will be felt differently depending on the country/location, and also because I don't expect (although I could be wrong since I've pretty well no experience in the area) that a 1deg rise in global temperatures would cause temperatures to rise in every country by 1deg (all else equal). It'd also allow comparisons between the experiences of individual countries compared to what the global picture is saying. I'm sure the data must exist for at least some countries for a number of years but I don't seem able to find it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PWDFzWt-Ag

It seems that no one with a brain bothers to look at anything more than a few dozen years of data to make predictions over the next hundred years. I wrote about this almost two years ago and so far, it has proven true.

To summarize what I wrote: the sun is the source of heat in the solar system. The Earth is still coming out of the last big ice age from a billion years ago. NASA has proven this, meaning that the solar system is warming. NASA proved this 40 years ago and it seems the global warming people only want to use some of the data not all of it. Our planet along with all the other planets have been warming at the same rate so unless you can prove that we are warming all the planets because of man then man is not the cause of global warming. Yes, the planet is getting warmer and will continue to get warmer as the SUN expands. My estimates are 140k years before the oceans start to boil away. The experiments on the Moon in the 70’s confirm that it has already started and documented but again no one wants to look at old data. Look at the planet Venus, it has no humans yet it has boiled away almost all of its water. Look at the Sahara, it used to be green and lush valleys and is now a barren region what makes you think that we caused this? the climate has been changing for millennia yet people only want to focus on the last fifty years. How can you honestly say that the warming trend we are going through is caused by man when the planet has been proven to be warming for over a hundred million years? Man has only been around for the last ten thousand years. It is short sighted to point to man as the cause, or even as a contributing factor.

The SUN stopped having sunspots and we start cooling at the same time. This was predicted by science years ago and still we want to say it is man that caused warmth or cold. Yes, you can say man is the cause if you exclude volcanoes, the heat from the Sun, and the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, then and only then can you point to man as the cause. Until then all we have is idiots running around screaming the sky is falling. Can we stop this warming or cooling? NO! Did man cause this warming or cooling? NO! Can man contribute to the warming or cooling? YES! In the same way that a mosquito bite contributes to a man with a slashed throat bleeding to death.

Solar forcings are also discussed here.

Funny how who posted the link matters more to you than the content of the video itself.

Did you in fact even bother to watch stubby's video, because it was fully supportive of Phil Jones *and* AGW.

And of course I called you an asshole without any provocation on your part, at least as far as you remember.