csteele,

It depends which year you start and finish on. I plotted some graphs using your data (assuming it was all accurate). If I began with any year up to 2000, I got a trendline indicating a rise in temp. If I began with 2001 or later there was a decline.

However if you exclude 2010, it doesn't matter what year you begin with, the trendline is going up. In fact, the rise is about 0.3 deg C if you go from 1997-2009.

This indicates that 2010 is probably an outlier, and is the very reason why it doesnt make sense to be looking at such short periods when discussing long term trends. Not to mention that this data is only for land temps and that if you include ocean and land temps, 2010 was the warmest on record (which is what we should really be looking at anyway).

Thanks for providing that for us.

i have avoided contributibng to this farce topic..[so far]

but now i have found a good rebuttal
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12844&page=0

quoting but a little bit from it

..''we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks
to stop a nosebleed.

I also think the climate debate..is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.

I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick.

It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference

and how I thought: aha, now there at last..is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.

Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion.

Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample.

When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me.

For,..apart from the hockey stick,
there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past,..when it changed naturally.

continues..""It was warmer in the Middle ages..and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

Stalagmites,tree lines and ice cores
all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago.

Evidence from Greenland suggests..that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free..for part of the late summer at that time.

Sea level is rising at the unthreatening rate..about a foot per century and decelerating.

Greenland is losing ice..at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century.

There has been no significant warming in Antarctica,..with the exception of the peninsula.

Methane has largely stopped increasing.

Tropical storm intensity and frequency
have gone down,not up,..in the last 20 years.

Your probability..of dying as a result of a drought.. a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally..than it was in the 1920s

No doubt,there will be..plenty of people thinking..“what about x?”

Well, if you have an X..that persuades you that rapid and dangerous climate change..is on the way,..tell me about it.

When I asked a senior government scientist this question, he replied with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum...That is to say,..a poorly understood hot episode,..*55 million years ago,of uncertain duration,..uncertain magnitude and uncertain cause.

Meanwhile, I see confirmation bias everywhere..in the climate debate.

Hurricane Katrina,Mount Kilimanjaro,the extinction of golden toads – all cited wrongly..as evidence of climate change...A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is “just weather”;..a flood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas..is “the sort of weather we can expect more of”.

A theory so flexible..it can rationalize any outcome..is a pseudoscientific theory.

To see confirmation bias in action,you only have to read the climategate emails,..documents that have undermined my faith..in this country’s scientific institutions.

It is bad enough..that the emails unambiguously.showed scientists plotting to cherry-pick data,subvert peer-review,..bully editors
and evade freedom of information requests.

What’s worse, to a science groupie like me, is that so much of the rest of the scientific community seemed OK with that.

They essentially shrugged their shoulders..and said,
yeh,..big deal,..boys will be boys.

Nor is there even..any theoretical support..for a dangerous future.
''

continued at link
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12844&page=0

OUG,

And then there's this to offer balance to your quote:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Ridleyriddle2.html

Dear Trashcanman,

My reason for choosing 1997 to 2010 was because ofGrahamY's comment; “Muller also says that he can see no evidence that global warming has slowed. That is contrasted against the claims that there has been no warming for the last 13 or so years.” and I had wanted to address that specifically.

I do however take your point about starting and finishing years determining the trend and it would not have really concerned me if it had been dropping over that small a scale.

I would like to see if Muller has done the figures past May 2010 as one suspects without a second aberrant result like April the year will end up being relatively high and not an outlier.

As Graham says all good statistical fun but nothing to sway either side. The concern is more the shoddy treatment of those figures by the GWPF. 

Dear Trashcanman,

I have done some trend lines as described in your earlier post and would like to back up your point that there is really only one time span that can be chosen to give even a slight negative trend. Every other combination returns a positive one. 

With such a small sample size it would be hard to claim a statistically significant trend or plateauing unless one were desperate. Indeed given that this was the hottest decade on record by a fair margin it seems rather silly to be discussing yearly trends especially given the rise in decadal average temperatures between the current decade and the prior one was larger than any on record since 1880.