I read articles and posts all the time from the other side of the climate debate based on anecdotal stuff, including here. Honeybees are dying due to global warming, its dry this year cause of global warming, this or that ice melted, blah blah blah.
If you look at the 150 year trend, the last 10 years are still record hot years, even though they are cooler than the preceding 10 years. The last 10 years are still above the temperature mean of the last 150 years, which means that the upward trend is still intact.
Statisticians will tell you that a rule of thumb to look for on whether a trend line is broken to the downside is if you see 6 or more data points below the mean. As you can see in the chart below, the last 10 years, although maybe cooler than the previous 10 years, are still well above the mean for the last 150 years. There wasn't a single data point below the mean, which tells me that we have a 99% certainty that the upward trend is still intact.
Your chart didn't work, but I don't think it matters. A 150 year chart captures much of the period following the end of the little ice age. And more importantly it captures mostly periods when humans were not burning very much fossil fuels. That has really taken off with the wave of worldwide industrialization in the last 60 years.
Instead of looking at the last 150 years why not look at the last 1000 years. There is good reason to think we still haven't gotten as warm as during the Medieval warm period. Maybe we won't. We could slip back into another little ice age for all we know. |
