BLOGGER'S NOTE: I lifted the text below (sans graphs) from Jürgen Hubert's blog post that can be accessed here: http://jhubert.livejournal.com/181274.html

Global Warming - How to Lie with Statistics


First of all, while the used data did show a cooling trend, my linear fit (done with GNUPlot) produced a cooling of:

-0.00156427 °C/month.

Extrapolated for an entire decade, like the author has done, this would translate into:

-0.00156427*12*10 °C/decade = -0.1877124 °C/decade

This is not even half as much as the 0.4 °C/decade the author claimed. But wait, it gets better!


It seems that the author of the article has deliberately started using the 2001-2008 HadCRUT3 data set with one of the hottest months in this period -- which happens to be January 2002 (so he didn't use any 2001 data after all, despite the caption of the graph) -- and then ended using the data with the very coldest month in this period, which was the abnormally cold January 2008:

With such a self-selected data set to confirm his bias, is it any wonder that he got a significant cooling trend?

And what's with using only six years and one month to extrapolate a "cooling per decade" value -- especially when the same data set goes back for far more than a decade and a real value could be easily calculated?

No wonder that this guy apparently doesn't have any peer-reviewed papers to his name -- with such blatant attempts at cooking the data, the reviewers would laugh him out of town.

So what would temperature trends over the last decade actually look like?

Well, I've used the same data set for the period from April 1998 to March 2008 (the last entry), and the following graph is the result...

BLOGGER'S NOTE: More at the link above, but do not fail to miss the update to Arthur Smith's deconstruction of Monckton's faux peer-reviewed paper here:

http://www.altenergyaction.org/Monckton.html