In any case, the argument went that NOAA (along with myriad contributing climate scientists) was still trying to scare the public, although it's clear that we are in a cooling trend.
So, I Googled "NOAA climate report cooling trend," and I found the internet abuzz with the news. Most of the stories used similar wording to the story my friend read. And many of the stories cited one "climate blogger," Pierre Gosselin as a source. So I checked him out.
Funny that the first sentence in his story is this:
"The political beauty about climate data is that it can be easily manipulated in order to fool the public."Mr. Gosselin meant that remark to be applied to NOAA, but it is an inadvertent confession. Gosselin's trick is one that is very well known to those who seek to use data to fool people, and, luckily, also to those who are truly interested in using data to find out what is really going on.
The trick is to take, from a large collection of data, a small slice that seems to contradict the data taken as a whole. In this case, Mr. Gosselin has selected a graph of temperatures between the years 1998 and 2012 which shows the temperature going down. The larger graph, beginning in the 1890s, shows a definite, accelerating warming trend. It would be one thing for the wishful thinkers to imagine that the temperatures are leveling off, but some of these blogs are contending that we've turned the corner, that climate scientists have been alarmists all along, and that we might be heading for an ice age.
Meanwhile, of course, we see that ice sheets in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic are melting faster than expected. It's all too visible.
The point is that, even as the atmosphere heats up in the long run, there will always be short periods when the temperature goes down. But the long term trend is still up.
Here's a thought experiment for you. On June 1, 2013, the high temperature in Washington DC was 91. Over the next week, the high temperatures were 86, 83, 78, 80, 76, and 73. Did that mean summer was not coming?
