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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated.

The projections for warming over the last 15 years have not panned out. There was no rise. So the earliest projections from the alarmists have proven to be wrong.

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EDIT: Nevermind, I mixed up sea levels and temperature.

Are you saying that sea levels in general haven't risen? Or that Florida in particular is somehow immune?

If the former, this[¹] seems to contradict you, are you saying it's wrong, or am I reading it in a different way?

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/F...

No, he's cherrypicking a start date for measuring global temperature rise--selecting 1998, which was an exceptionally strong El Nino year, resulting in an anomalously high yearly average global temperature--and then comparing subsequent yearly average temperatures based on that epoch. In essence he's comparing a trendline to a single outlier, and using that to come to an invalid conclusion.

Using that sort of reasoning, it's pretty trivial to show no "warming". But it's nothing more than statistical trickery. When you look at the overall trend, it's pretty clear that global warming has continued apace, right in line with predictions made decades ago. It's actually pretty impressive how closely reality has hewed to those predictions:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-c...

The argument that climate scientists claim x% of warming every decade is a straw man.. that is not a claim they have made and then failed at. They have claimed longer-term warming with short-term fluctuations (considering that carbon emissions are only one factor among many), and if you pull out to a 100-year view, that claim has been maintained. In fact, when carbon emissions as a factor is removed from model predictions for the last 15 years or so, they predict cooling.. so the "flatness" in comparison indicates that carbon emissions brought the average temperature up.

In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.

>> The argument that climate scientists claim x% of warming every decade is a straw man.. that is not a claim they have made and then failed at.

Thanks for playing. You lose: https://www.google.com/search?q=global+warming+prediction+fr...

I'm not sure how a Google search for a series of loosely related graphs addresses either of my arguments. I assume you are thinking that their existence refutes them somehow, but I don't see anything on the first page that contradicts anything I said.

>> I'm not sure how a Google search for a series of loosely related graphs addresses either of my arguments.

Your argument was that my argument was a strawman. Those graphs all show projections that have not panned out. To be definitive, either of us would need to locate the original claims from a reliable source.

Those graphs don't show a prediction of an x% increase for a particular decade, however. It seems you're interpreting them as literal average temperature predictions for a decade, when they represent where a linear regression line would pass through when that decade's averages are considered alongside previous decades' temperature data.

In case you don't grok the difference, the difference is that a relatively flat decade followed by a huge temperature jump will have the linear regression line for that decade be higher than the actual temperature, because the of the later jump. This is what is (likely) happening now (and what happened in 77-86, and 87-96). The most popular theory as to this seems to be that the heat is stored in the deep ocean, and then releases in a burst into the surface atmosphere.

Which takes me to my second point, that even with your interpretation (which is generally the interpretation of the graphs used to make the 'no warming in 15 years' argument), the graphs being used are surface temperature, and don't include ocean warming. As I mentioned above, including ocean temperatures shows a rise even in static decade temperature, without even involving linear regression.

If you'd like a source, the intended interpretation of the results are all in the IPCC reports, most of which have (reasonably) short summaries. http://www.ipcc.ch/

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