The Trib Gets The Climate Wrong. Again.

Every couple of weeks, it seems, my friends on Scaife's braintrust (they're the folks responsible for the Tribune-Review's editorials) publish yet another bit of climate science denial.

Or rather, it's the same retched bit just heaved back at us.  Every few weeks.

This past Friday, they published this:

Blame-mankind “scientists” can't explain global warming's virtual halt since 1997 while U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide have fallen to 1994 levels.

First, I want you to notice the acknowledgement in the first phrase (how the scientists can't explain the warming's halt).  Think about that for a second.  If there has been a halt to the warming (as they clearly state) then that also means that has been warming (ie one that's been "halted.")

They seem to have abandoned their "climate science is a perversion of genuine science" line some time ago (at least as far back as this) but they're still hard at work undermining the genuine science nonetheless.

So has there actually been a halt to global warming?

Um, no.  Take a look at this actual science from Columbia University:

And:

They're both taken from this page. And this is what that page says about the data they represent:

The figure(s) show 60-month (5-year) and 132-month (11-year to minimize the effect of the solar cycle) running means of the surface temperature deviation from the 1951-1980 mean. This graph makes clear that global warming is continuing — it did not stop in 1998. The year 1998 was remarkably warm relative to the underlying trend line, in association with the El Nino" of the century. But the underlying global temperature has continued to rise, despite the fact that solar irradiance for the past few years has been stuck in the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data.[Emphasis added.]

See that? The first graph has the "roughest" line (the "Annual Mean) that gets smoothed out with a 5 year running mean (that's when they average the first five years and then years 2 through 6 and then 3 through 7 and so on - it's used to take sudden, one time anomalies into account).  You see what they did in the second chart?  There's a 5 year mean and then an 11 year mean.  As the scope gets larger the line gets smoother and the point is clearer.

No halt to global warming since 1997.

The Trib gets it wrong.

Again.

And since the rest of the editorial rests on that so-called bit of information, the rest of the editorial inevitably fails as well.