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When I first saw this article in the Wall Street Journal, with the headline The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up, I half expected some simpering industry-friendly puff piece emphasizing one of the latest tidbits of misinformation peddled by the energy industry. But the article was reasonably well written and contained some good background material, despite giving too much attention to the 'cooling' soundbite or explaining what it really means:
That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don't believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case.
Whatever source you're going to use for data, it's important to be consistent. I use the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis or GISSTEMP. If we look at the GLOBAL Land-Ocean Temperature Index data, you'll see rows and columns of temperature arranged by months and years in degree Celsius. The Annual Mean, abbreviated AnnMean, shows the change from the baseline temperature for each year in hundredths of a degree C. So for example that first line labeled 1880 (The first year empirical records count in this data set) the January - December annual mean was -8, or 0.08 C cooler than the baseline period used, which is 1951-1980. The data is also available as a graph with a five year moving average, below.
Using this data, the warmest three years were 2005 (0.76) , 2007 (0.71), and 1998 (0.70). As you can see the values are all very close together, the cooling trend so often mention in articles skeptical of climate change is essentially non existent in this data set. It's that tiny little hook over at the right top end. In other data sets, the cooling trend is minute -- measured in fractions of a degree on the order of one-hundredths -- but at least there's a 'there' there.
Calling such minute changes a cooling trend is pushing it. Doing so to argue that larger differentials on the warm side, and a much longer trend of warming, is useless if your goal is to accurately inform readers. It would mean that every new record high is the start of a cooling trend -- for the same reason a hilltop cannot exist without lower contours around it. A record high every other year for decades on end would obviously be evidence of a warming global climate, but using the backasswards tactic, it would mean a lot of cooling trends! It only makes sense to use the term under such conditions if the goal is to plant an erroneous idea in the mind of a reader -- or even a reporter. Say it often enough despite the data, and perhaps other reporters and media outlets might pick up on it and use the same language, too. Maybe that's what happened to the reporter on the WSJ article. Then again, maybe not.
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