Monday, February 15, 2010

Little Green Footballs catches The Daily Mail telling the truth

The owner of Little Green Footballs claims the Daily Mail is lying: The Daily Mail's Latest Lie About Climate Change

His assertion:

The Daily Mail’s story by David Rose, claiming that climate scientist Phil Jones “admitted” there has been no global warming since 1995, is completely false.

His evidence:

The BBC interviews Phil Jones:
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
...the text is more reasonable, if also, well, wrong:
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

Well, it's quite possible that if we continue into the future, the average trend will be upward, at a rate that lets us reject the null hypothesis. But Jones stated the trends over the past 15 years do not show statistically significant warming. It is impossible to reject the null hypothesis of no warming over the past fifteen years.

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