[secretagent]

I read that the Earth's temperature had plateaued and actually dropped by a fraction of a degree in recent years.

One warmer's response:

I got this from a mainstream site, Gristmill - "How to Talk to a Skeptic"

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/4/175028/329

Their graph shows variations above and below a trend line of increasing temperatures, and includes the 1998 spike. The trend line still goes up.

[ancient_geezer]

It pays to take a look at a graph with better resolution that shows what is currently going on.

The short term high spikes in temperature of the following graph are do to El Nino, the red line is the combined ocean & land temperature index, the black is land meteorlogical stations only.

 

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C_lrg.gif

[Robert A Cook PE]

See?

Even his chart slows the temperature has "leveled off" since Bush became president!

Seriously.

Do you see the BOTTOM of the recent "red" lines - the lines that are high-lighted as IF they were filled in from 0 to the current temp increase of .3 degrees? On the REAL chart from NASA for troposphere temperatures (which is what this character has warped for his purposes) the red lines are the max-min points for each year. They are NOT filled in like he has done. They do NOT show a continuous rise since 1980.

They do NOT show a "0" point at 1980 - a LOW point in NASA's graph!

This graph from the warmer socialist is a LIE. Temperatures since the 1998 peak have been up and down, but have NOT increased since that period: they are steady, but cycling up AND DOWN around the same point they were 8 years ago.

[rustbucket]

I looked at some NASA global temperature anomaly data I had archived back in 2002 from the site NASA data. Surprisingly, the data were fairly different than the current NASA data set at the same web site.

Here's how the old and new yearly average anomalies compare:

Jan-Dec global average anomalies reported in 2002 followed by average anomalies currently reported for same years.
1990 49 38
1991 44 35
1992 16 13
1993 19 14
1994 31 24
1995 45 38
1996 34 30
1997 38 40
1998 69 57
1999 41 33
2000 39 33
2001 52 48

All of a sudden 1998 is not the warmest year on record in the NASA data. Though I didn't show it above, 2005 is the warmest year in the current data set with an anomaly value of 63. Somebody has been adjusting the data to give different average values.

The NASA data table says that the data since 1981 have had outliers eliminated and the data made "homogeneous."