Plumb Bob’s Recent Comments

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  Misleading chart, misleading article

  Readers need to note that the second chart, above, is a chart of anomalies, not temperatures -- that is, it's a comparison against some expected norm. If you go back to the original chart at NASA, you discover that the baseline value they're comparing against is the mean temperature for the period 1951-1980 -- which happens to incorporate pretty much an entire 30-year cooling trend (pretty obviously chosen to make the changes appear more dramatic; my "public relations rather than science" warning light just lit). The darker red areas on the chart mean, in plain English, "the change in temperature over what it was during the coolest part of the cooling trend is greater in the far north than anywhere else."

  This says nothing whatsoever about urban heat island effects; it says that whatever global trend we're watching, it affects the northern hemisphere more. In fact, what it says about the recent warming is precisely what you folks say about the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age: that the warming is a regional phenomenon, not a global one.

  But it doesn't say a blessed thing about urban heat island effects. Your charts don't put any objections to bed, contrary to your confident claim.On 'Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect' -- No, it isn't posted 1 year, 4 months ago 25 Responses