With global temperature data now available for the first three months of 2014, an interesting trend has clearly emerged: global cooling. No longer is it just a hypothesis. For the first quarter of each calendar year since 2002, it is effectively a fact at reasonably strong statistical significance. Here is the data:
That downward trend since 2002 has a p-value of 0.097 (r=-0.48), which is below the p=0.10 (90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}) threshold used in many climate science studies for statistical significance, and very close to the standard p=0.05 (95{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}) threshold generally employed across the physical and biological sciences. The same level of statistical significance is obtained regardless of whether parametric or non-parametric trend analysis methods are employed.
Some readers may be looking at this plot and thinking that the global climate data since 1880 looks a lot like a cycle, with a stable period (of neither warming nor cooling) of, say, 140 years in length between the approximately 70-year long alternating cool and warm periods. It certainly has that appearance. If such is the case, we would expect a return to “normal” January-March global temperatures by 2050, give or take a decade or two.
In the United States, the January-March 2014 temperature was well below the 20th-century average. There has been no statistically significant trend in January-March temperatures in the contiguous USA since 1980. None, for 35 years and counting. The same lack of trend applies for the December-February temperatures. Depending on how you define winter, either – or both – of these timeframes is considered the wintertime period.
So there has been absolutely no change in wintertime temperatures in the United States since before Reagan was president, and yet the The Guardian is reporting that the latest National Climate Assessment finds climate change to be a “clear and present danger” and that “Americans are noticing changes all around them … Winters are generally shorter and warmer.”







Let’s go through his sophistry:
Apparently, “Clean Air Partnership [CAP], a non-profit that addresses climate-change issues, says maximum temperatures in Toronto are expected to rise 7 C over the next 30 to 40 years.” That is a remarkable claim. A predicted 7 degrees Celsius increase in maximum temperatures over a 30-year period in Toronto equates to a rate of 23.3 degrees Celsius per century. To say that is insanely large would be an understatement.
Here is what Slater reported on March 30 2014.
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