AlchemyToday

Over at the Corner, Jim Manzi back up his colleague Mark Steyn’s appraisal that, “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”  What he’s saying is that if you are 29 you graduated in 1998 and that if you are graduating high school you were starting 1st grade in 1998–which was warmer than average (the second warmest year ever); there has been only one warmer year since and last year was not it.  Ergo, look at these two endpoints and there’s been no global warming for a decade!  Fortunately, we have many more than two data points.  If you look at all of the available data and subject it to a linear fit, you’ll find the following rates of global warming:

1999-2009: 1.52 degrees C/century

1960-2008: 1.34 degrees C/century

Jim Manzi looks at these graphs and says, “The funny thing is that if you zoom in on about the last ten years, you see this: There has not been a lot of measured warming for the last ten years.”  In fact, global warming has been faster over the past 10 years than it has over the past half century; in other words, the best evidence that we have shows that global warming is happening and is accelerating.  If you fit the 1960-2008 data to a second order polynomial, the rate of global warming is increasing by 0.02 degrees/century every year.

The only way to look at the data and come to the conclusion shared by Mark Steyn, George Will, and Jim Manzi is to be ignorant or knowingly deceitful.