Finding a Temperature Trend

The global warming fanatics would tell you that we are caught up in a "runaway" global warming that is going to slowly cook us to death.

Here's a 120 year record of temperatures recorded in the US. I don't see any obvious "trend" in this data:


What bothers me is that fanatics can sell an idea if it is superficially "reasonable". Back in the mid 1970s I taught high school and had materials telling the kids that they had to face a world with shrinking oil supplies and ever higher oil prices. This was triggered by a short term run up in oil prices as OPEC flexed its muscle. But the fanatics did a linear extrapolation into a doomsday scenario. The book Limits to Growth was really popular in the 1970s and helped to reinforce the doomsday thinking in that decade. This fraud was perpetrated by those who sold people on a "peak oil" theory.

I have no doubt that oil production will peak, my quibble is over the doomsters saying it is immanent and the reality that it keeps fading into the future because reserves keep increasing. The doomsters don't let you see that we will always be "within 20 years of running out of oil" because oil companies have no financial incentive to find more than a 20 year supply. The fact that we are not really near the limit can be seen by this BBC report that points out that Venezuela has 513 billion barrels of recoverable oil, enough to supply the entire world's needs for nearly 20 years.

Back to climate fanaticism... For the last decade or so, apocalyptic fanatics have once again seized the public's imagination and sold everybody on the story of "global warming" and the doom we face. But since the Hadley CRU e-mails were released, it is now obvious that this was a hyped up story fed by the same fanaticism that created doomsday scenarios in the 1970s.

I have no doubt that humans are having an effect on the climate. My quibble is over how much of the "change" is human-induced and how much is natural. They have pushed climate models as a "science" but this confidence in models isn't justified. I think the "global warming" fanatics have indulged their need for an apocalyptic scare story. It appears to me that human activity has only modest effects on climate and it isn't clear to me that the natural reduction of dependence on fossil fuels which will come as our technology progresses and gets "greener" over the next 50 years won't "solve" the problem without the need for hysteria.

From a posting using NOAA data, here is a snapshot of the earth this week. Notice how both poles are colder than normal. The global warming fanatics have told us that as the earth warms it will show up first and strongest in the highest latitudes. Well... this picture doesn't show the story that the global warming fanatics are trying to sell: