A magic moment in the history of troll; it may never come again.
OK, so you know the climate-change denier talking point about global warming supposedly “stopping” in the last ten years. It’s a classic example of how to lie with numbers; you just choose the bit of the data series that suits you and forget the rest. 1998 was really hot, so you start the chart there, and presto, a flat or declining trend. Learn about it here. Of course, the facts that it was rising steadily before ’98 and has been rising steadily since then, and that the best evidence that something isn’t rising is not that there has been an all-time high value recently are ignored.
Now, well, 1998 isn’t ten years ago any more. So, I was wondering if any of the trolls would be sighted claiming that global warming has stopped in the last ten years, now their own talking point doesn’t make sense even on its own terms. Enter David “no-one could be better named” Duff with a genuinely duff performance.
Incidentally, ‘Little Willy’, what’s happened to all that global warming in the last 10 years? No, on second thoughts don’t bother replying to that, your written equivalent of the clicks and grunts of a Kalahari bushman is simply too, too, tedious.
Oh, mate, that’s your Prime Directive (“Don’t be such an arse about it”) violated right there, with a good dollop of racism chucked in.
But for our purposes, look at the chart here; if you start measuring 10 years ago from today, in 1999, you get a warming trend of almost 0.4 degrees C, about four times greater than the linear regression would give you! DOOOMED I tell you!
Quite an achievement; you’d think that repeating talking points was within anyone’s abilities, but we’ve found a troll who can even bollocks that up. FAIL.
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BORISFEED
Alternate Seat of TYR 
June 9, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Oo, I love spotting that kind of fakery – I once saw a classic example which showed that rail privatisation was a really good deal for taxpayers by taking the mid-90s-recession rail subsidy level* compared to the point where Railtrack wasn’t investing in infrastructure (i.e. just before it collapsed and the state had to assume massive liabilities) to prove that nationalisation is a money pit.
* For extra goodness, I think this was the bit where they stuffed extra subsidy in to make it more attractive to buyers…
June 10, 2009 at 2:42 pm
It’s his hardcore “never apologise, never admit you’re wrong, NO MATTER WHAT” attitude that dumbfounds me.
Does a man *learn* those skills? Or are they simply a function of deep-seated stupidity?
June 10, 2009 at 5:15 pm
What’s the chart you’re linking to? I don’t see a 10-year one at that link. You might consider using woodfortrees to make a custom chart for 10 years, like this one: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1999/plot/wti/from:1999/trend
June 10, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Ooh, shiny! However I’m both lazy, and also concerned by the cogsci research that suggests that we are all influenced by bad data even if we know it’s bad.
June 11, 2009 at 12:08 am
What’s extra fun is when you plot 1998-2008, the holy grail decade for denial…
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1998/to:2008/plot/wti/from:1998/to:2008/trend
Ah, the decade of the downward trend… as long as down means up.
June 10, 2009 at 9:59 pm
In the discussion David Duff refers to his blog to show how Hansen’s projections failed. Turns out he compares Hansen’s annual data to RSS MSU monthly without correcting the anomalies for the difference in the base period of the anomalies. A rough approximation for the necessary correction is to push up RSS MSU by about 0.25°C, eyeballed from this graph.