Global Warming Deniers At It Again
Posted by
tgirsch
(Or, as Uncle would say, “They have to lie to win.”)
Over at Tennessefree, poster Serr8d triumphantly produces a graphic that contrasts sea ice concentrations from yesterday’s date in 1980 against yesterday. (See the graphic here.) Quoth Serr8d: “Nice bit of rebounding, eh?”
Only there are two problems with his graphics, one minor and one major. The minor problem is that the 1980 graphic doesn’t include snow cover, while the 2008 graphic does, making the comparison look a bit more favorable than it ought to. But the major problem is that the dates he chose are in the winter! Anyone who knows a damn thing about the polar sea ice problem knows that winter isn’t the problem, summer is. And lookie what happens when you rewind five months from both dates, so that you have a late summer date to compare rather than a late winter date: there was substantially less sea ice this past summer than there was 28 years earlier. I don’t have exact figures, but from eyeballing it, I’d say it’s something like 33% less. See that graphic here.
And they wonder why I accuse them of cherry-picking.
Meanwhile, Serr8d also clings (for dear life) to the tired, old “it’s really the sun that’s doing it” even though solar intensity has been decreasing for the last several years, even as the planet continues to warm, and even though the most generous estimates say that solar activity could account for a quarter at most of current warming trends.
Still, if my past experiences with AGW deniers are any indication, the odds of a retraction, correction, or other mea culpa approach zero.
