… will be duped by the Wall Street Journal. Two years ago George Will tried to make a dubious claim about there being no evidence of recent global warming, and I objected and showed why the interpretation was wrong.

Now we get a re-hash of that claim, along with some other tired canards, from an op-ed in the WSJ. There’s no shortage of people calling them out on it.

The latest I’ve read is at Bad Astronomy, where Phil has included a graph of temperatures over the last ~40 years. It’s a noisy graph. So noisy that (as with the George Will article) if you took any 10- or 15-year period, you could conceivably draw a straight line through it and consider it a possibility. But when you look at a longer data set, the rise is unmistakeable. Incontrovertible, one might say.

However, I must repeat my prior analysis: a slope larger than the best fit is equally plausible as a straight line through any short data set. Which is why saying that there is no statistically-significant evidence of warming — zero increase isn’t statistically excluded — is a very different statement from saying that there has been no warming. That latter statement implies that you can statistically exclude an increase, which is a ludicrous claim.

Phil goes on to mention another turd of an article that came out recently. In it they make some dubious claims, including a no-recent-warming assertion similar to the WSJ, and conclude that the climate models must be wrong. Anyway, the Bad Astronomy post has lots of links if you are interested in the followup to all this.