CO2 HOG

Much ado has been made about global warming stopping since 2001, since 1998 or not increasing in the last decade. Here is more grist to the skeptic mill. The analysis below shows the global temperature has not increased significantly since 1979!

Data are from the TLT Sellite measurements of the Earth’s lower troposphere at RSS MSU. When you calculate the global surface temperatures from July to July 1979-2008, the earth has warmed the grand amount of 0.295 degrees C. The standard deviation of temperature changes from each July to July is 0.2522C, putting the change over 30 years at just over a non-significant one standard deviation (actually p=0.13, significant if p<0.05) of the expected change in just one year. Stated another way, temperatures would be expected to change by a similar amount to the increase in the last 30 years, every one out of eight years.

You have to wonder what all the fuss us about. The effect of 30 years of global warming is no greater than the expected change in a single year. The data support low estimates of CO2 doubling as the Spencer climate sensitivity.

The frequency of July-July annual differences with a normal curve is plotted above using R language for the statistics. The temperature difference from July 1979 to July 2008 is marked as a big red dot.

Here is another view of July temperatures over the last 30 years, with the levels of the start and end points marked by red dashed lines.

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