The latest drivel from anti-Science Global Warming Deniers is this:

Global warming stopped in 1998 and it has been cooling since then.

I am hearing this all over the place. What they then do is carefully pick the temperatures from individual years and compare them with other individual years to try and show a pattern that suggests cooling. There are three problems with this.

First, the possibility of cooling trends, locally or temporary, is quite likely within a general warming trend. Climate does not change linearly, but will vary up and down from year to year. This is why, as I will say again below, individual years are not significant. An individual year can include anomalies like El Nino or La Nina conditions. In addition, things like volcanic eruptions can cause temporary cooling (something deniers like Rush Limbaugh seemed to ignore when they used to claim, in the 1990's, that global warming was caused by Mt. Pinatubo). An initial cooling over Antarctica was predicted by the global warming models. This Antarctic cooling has been used by some deniers, who either don't realize or ignore that temporary cooling of Antarctica was predicted by the models, as "evidence" that global warming wasn't happening. Well, as predicted, that cooling trend has ended even in Antarctica. The only deviation from what was predicted by the models was the temporary cooling didn't last as long as predicted.

Second, there is a major error made by the deniers: you do NOT judge science based on selected data points. Only using a complete data set. The deniers cherry pick individual years to make their point. Scientists use entire data sets. When you do that, THIS is what you see:

And THIS:

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Breaking out of Oslo: Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, together with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC.

The New York Times:

OSLO, Oct. 12 — The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Al Gore, the former vice president, and to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its work to alert the world to the threat of global warming.

The award is likely to renew calls from Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowded field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interested in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.[...]

The Bay Area has been the staging area for an online movement to draft Mr. Gore to mount another campaign for the White House. A San Francisco-based Web site, www.Draftgore.com, claims more than 165,000 signatures and comments on an online petition, including several placed early this morning congratulating Mr. Gore on his win.

The same group also placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, pleading with Mr. Gore to rectify his bitter defeat in 2000, when he won the national popular vote but lost the electoral college after the Supreme Court ruled against a recount in Florida.

Run, Al, run. Your country needs you.

Interesting morning, isn't it. The trains are all flooded. The tracks between Lawrence and Court in Brooklyn lost power due to flooding. My co-worker was stuck getting from Governor's Island. Sewage was backing up in my apartment (despite my building's $300,000 sump pumps, but at least the pumps kept the backup from becoming the fountaining river it used to be). The research facility I work at in Manhattan is flooded in the basement (I don't have access to the animal facility, so I can't check it, but it is in the basement!) and the elevators are out. And Brooklyn, technically speaking, had a tornado.  read more »