Seeing the environmental forest

It's amusing to me whenever a science denier cites the ice cores in Greenland as "proof" that global warming either a) isn't happening or b) isn't a big deal. It's a horrible argument for deniers to make. Here's why. First, we're talking about ice cores taken from one location in Greenland. Not only is it one single location, but it just happens to be Greenland's highest point (10,660 feet/3,249 meters above sea level) and near the center of the continental glacier that covers Greenland. Guess what? It's going to be cold up there, just from the elevation alone, to say nothing of how all that ice affects the local temperature. Location matters. It's amusing that the same deniers who claim urban heat island when trying to explain away any warming trends seem to forget that when faced with factors that would decrease the rate of local temperature change. Second, when we talk about global warming, we mean the entire planet, which is fa...

WUWT published a piece by Danle Wolfe which purports to measure the correlation between CO 2 and global temperature.  As you can probably predict, Wolfe's conclusion is that there is no relationship. "Focusing on the most recent hiatus below, both visually and in a 1 st order linear regression analysis there clearly is effectively zero correlation between CO 2 levels and global mean temperature."  Unfortunately for Wolfe, all he's produced is a fine example of mathturbation as well as an example of forming a conclusion first then warping the evidence to fit.

While browsing a climate change article on Huffington Post, I noticed a global warming denier using a Watts Up With That post by Lord Monckton as "evidence" that global temperatures haven't changed since September 1996.  In it, Monckton uses least squares regression to show that satellite data from RSS is flat (trend: -0.0001394ºC per year) between September 1996 and January 2014.