The nutters really came out last night and on this spot as well. How some of these people function on a day to day basis is scary.
Posted by Kenny, Friday, 13 July 2007 2:49:14 PM

Kenny you are such a spoilsport.

I think this is going to be an interesting debate and entertaining, In another 10 years most people would have forgotten all about it.

Must give the ABC credit that at least for once they gave some air time to people other than the wacky lefties. Hopefully this will be the start of bring just a tiny bit of balance back into our taxpayer funded Labour arm.

Note that Tony Jones committed the same crime that he condemned Durkin for. Durkin was rightly criticised for not including the post 1980 temperature and solar radiation data in the graph. But Jones then supposedly filled in the missing information with a temperature line that shot out through the top of the graph. It did not show the slight decline that has taken place since 1998. And one must ask, why?

Karoly tried to sidestep this fact by claiming that the trend was still rising. But he would have known perfectly well that any trend line, such as a 5, 10 or 21 year moving average, is primarily influenced by the earlier records. The records that will determine the true state of the trend in 2006 have not yet been recorded.

For the record, the global mean temperature in 2001 was 14.38C while the global mean for 2006 was 14.40C. Jones is to be roundly condemned as the sleaziest of hypocrites for having the gall to try on the very same distortion, in the same instance, as he was viciously condemning someone else for doing the same.

It may be news to some readers that the ABC's Robyn Williams, as well as being a renowned scientist and journalist, is also a prescient novelist:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/php/archive_details_list.php?article_id=560

Perseus, where do you get your global mean temperatures? Both NASA in the USA and the UK's Climate Research Unit are confident with their 2006 estimates, but they don't match as the methodologies are marginally different.

NASA's latest figures are here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

And the Hadley Centre's current figures are here:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

(Figures are given as anomalies from the 1961-1990 average, which NASA estimates as "very very close to" 14 deg. C. Esoteric reasons for not (often) mentioning the "absolute average" are given here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
http://www.junkscience.com/GMT/compareNCDC.htm )

For the lazy, putting two and two together, we get the following estimates for the last ten years:

year ____ NASA ____ Hadley
1997 ___ 14.40 ___ 14.351
1998 ___ 14.57 ___ 14.546
1999 ___ 14.32 ___ 14.296
2000 ___ 14.33 ___ 14.270
2001 ___ 14.48 ___ 14.409
2002 ___ 14.56 ___ 14.464
2003 ___ 14.55 ___ 14.473
2004 ___ 14.49 ___ 14.447
2005 ___ 14.63 ___ 14.482
2006 ___ 14.54 ___ 14.420

The NASA averages are less conservative, and show 2005 to be warmer than 1998. Hadley's figures still have 1998 as the all-recorded-history maximum, but it's quite clear from all the graphs and from both sets of numbers that the cool La Niña dip after the big 1998 El Niño only lasted two years. For the last seven years, temperatures have remained above 1997 levels and, with minor wiggles, seem to be marching up again.

Hadley went out on a limb in January to predict 2007 was going to be another record El Niño year like 1998:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6228765.stm

But it doesn't seem to be happening; instead we finally got our rain back in Eastern Australia in June. Maybe next year :-)

On the other hand, perhaps the whole tropical Pacific has begun to behave differently after that big boom/bust six years ago. Forecasting is a fickle business!!

Admiral have a look at this joker ....

Robyn Williams may be an articulate and witty media savvy science bugs bunny but he simply still follows what he sees as the good fairie dust of the the big bang hypothesis and its high priests. For all the years he has been in the media interviewing scientists he still hasn't progressed from these old faked up, gravity-only, closed cosmological models that a thirteen year old can see through as non science because it is quite illogical. e.g. We see an entire zoo of invented fictional entities and forces tossed to these media bugs bunnies .... such as a speck appearing instantaneously from nothing, an expanding universe or is it inflating, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, accretion disks, ultradense objects, gravity warping of space-time, "visions of God", string theory, multiples of dimensions, time travel, etc, etc.

No wonder he has now found the need to write some fiction. But if he could only grasp the essential basis of science that has been so well put by Bob Carter here in OLO .......... "For you see, science is not about the triumph of the weight of numbers, nor about consensus, nor about the will of the social majority. An idea such as the greenhouse hypothesis is validated not by shouting but by experimental and observational testing and logical analysis." ... "Rather, science requires that to be successful a hypothesis only needs to be clearly stated, understandable, have explanatory power and withstand testing. It takes one person, not an army, ...."