Seeing the environmental forest

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute had a piece on Forbes back in May that escaped my attention when it first came out.  Titled " Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat ", it focused on the single premise that since 2012, total polar sea ice was above the average since 1979.  Taylor then jumped to the erroneous conclusions that a) polar sea ice was not retreating and b) global warming will be entirely beneficial to humans.  His arguments are familiar, as I dealt with them before when a Newsmax article featured them back in 2014 .  He's recycling old talking points, so this post is going to echo the one I wrote a year ago.

Okay, I'm back.  Sorry for the lengthy gap between posts but work and losing my laptop intervened.  Now to get back in the saddle. A reader by the pen name of cosmicomic asked several questions on my last post concerning James Taylor's claims about winter-time cooling in the US.  Since NOAA's climate-at-a-glance widget didn't work properly for him, I thought I'd post a video of what one should see as well as expound on the bogus method Taylor used.  Specifically, I'll examine Taylor claim that winters in the US have cooled, with the cooling trend dating back to 1930. First, a very brief tutorial by yours truly on using NOAA's widget and what you should see when you do: Now, Taylor's claim that US winters have cooled since 1930 is already in trouble. The simple linear regression model done by the widget shows that US winters have warmed by an average of +0.18ºF/decade since 1930. ARMA time series regression shows that the warming trend since 193...

A couple days ago, James Taylor of the Heartland Institute published what is one of the most disingenuous, misleading, and ignorant articles I have ever had the misfortune of reading.  It's a wonder Forbes even saw fit to publish such obvious claptrap.