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One of the most familiar memes we hear from the climate-change deniers is the phrase, “Global warming ended in 1998 and it’s been cooling since then.” You find something along these lines on most of the AGW denier books and websites, and it is repeated endlessly as if somehow repetition makes it more true. This is just like creationists who continually repeat the phony argument that “evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics”, even though this is patently false. As has been pointed out many times, the Second Law only applies to closed systems. The earth is not a closed system since it receives energy from the sun. Yet in every creationist book and website and debate for many decades now you’ll hear them repeat it over and over again, since it sounds impressive to their scientifically unsophisticated audience and apparently they cannot understand why it’s wrong, or they don’t care as long as it suits their political agenda.
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Picking 1998 as a starting point is a classic example of cherry-picking data to show what you want it to show, and a deliberate attempt to distort the actual record. As climatologists have known for years, 1998 was an exceptionally warm year due to a record El Niño, which boosted average global temperature way above the overall trend from the past few decades. During El Niño years, the marine circulation patterns release a lot of tropical heat from the oceans and raise overall global temperature for a short time. Likewise, 2008 was a La Niña year, and it was cooler than normal. These are part of the year-to-year “noise” in the system of global temperatures that is well known to scientists. Scientists nevertake a single year’s temperature and then connect it to another data point and claim it’s a “trend.” Instead, the only rigorous and scientifically defensible method is to look at the long-term trends in climate over decades and “smooth” the curve using rolling averages, so that a more statistically meaningful curve fit can be performed.
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Cherry-picking can be played both ways. If I pick any year prior to 1998-2000 and connect with any data point from 2001 onwards, I get a warming trend. In fact, the only way a AGW denier could get their “no warming since 1998″ misrepresentation is to deliberately and consciously look at the curve, pick 1998 to start, and only compare it to 1999-2001. Any other long-term combination of the data shows warming. Thus, this distortion of the data that Will keeps repeating is not just a simple misreading of the facts. Since the meme is quoted from 2009, this means that the deniers were consciously and fraudulently trying to distort the data to suit their purposes. The fact that this lie keeps being perpetuated despite the fact that scientists have offered numerous corrections shows the AGW deniers have the same casual disregard for the truth that creationists do. Such practices demonstrate the absymal level of their scientific integrity, and speaks to the fact that AGW deniers are not climate scientists, but people with political agendas who cherry-pick data, quote-mine out of context, and use whatever lies and half-truths they need to support their cause. The parallel with creationists and other science deniers could not be any clearer.
you can always “find research to support” anything you like, and I commented to that effect. Indeed, that is exactly how I used to work, before I knew better. Probably until at least 2005, I was still much more of a massage therapist than a science writer. (I quit massage more than a year ago.) I thought like a therapist, had therapist thoughts, and therapist theories. I would bring those ideas to my desk and look for scientific papers in PubMed that backed me up — pretty much the definition of “cherry picking” — and then (groan) fancy myself to be quite the smarty pants. I really hadn’t the faintest clue that scientific papers could be so incredibly misleading, or how trivial a single experimental result was — the sound of one hand clapping.
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Well-intentioned and naive cherry picking isn’t always a total disaster. If you do it with a shred or two of integrity. You might actually pick some good cherries, and you might care about it when you find one that tastes funny. I started to give less weight to little studies when I noticed that they were often contradicted by better ones. I began to prefer the findings of more credible reviews and larger RCTs.
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BMJ Clinical Evidence — an excellent organization that publishes EBM reviews (much like the World HQ for EBM, <!-- citekey: cochrane -->The Cochrane Collaboration) — updated their acute low back pain review recently (sorry, link behind paywall — a clever Google search may give you a link that will work from the search results). Here’s what they had to say about spinal manipulative therapy:
One systematic review (149 people) and one subsequent RCT (101 people) added at this update. The review and RCT found no significant difference between spinal manipulation and placebo or usual care in pain. One further study added in harms which reports on adverse effects after spinal manipulation. Categorization of spinal manipulation changed from ‘Likely to be beneficial’ to ‘Unknown effectiveness.’
Climate cherry pickers: Falling humidity
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Scientific skepticism requires we consider the full body of evidence before coming to conclusions. The antithesis of genuine skepticism is ignoring all the evidence that contradicts a desired conclusion.
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he article seems to overlook the relative importance of solar radiation and wind as being the two main drivers of evaporation, translating as the skin temperature of the evaporating surface rather than ambient temperature, and the airflow over it, which in the case of solar radiation would make water vapour more of a forcing than a feedback.
This paper details the calculations and the various inputs that are involved
BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY REFERENCE
EVAPOTRANSPIRATION CALCULATIONS - 4 more annotation(s)...
Big Pharma Explain How To Pick Cherries
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from a big pharmaceutical company (GlaxoSmithKline)
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