Johnny’s Growth

Suppose, just for argument’s sake, that when your son Johnny turned 2 years old you decided to monitor his growth. His birthday is Jan. 1, so on the first of every month you measure his height — you even mount a tape measure permanently on the wall so you can measure him in the same location each time. You dutifully record the number for each measurement. Your wife thinks this is “cute” so she decides to take a picture every time you do, and puts them in a photo album labelled “Our Growing Child.” Since she’s a professional photographer, she uses her amazing Nikon super-high-res digital camera. All her friends think it’s super-cute.

We must be doing something right

It seems that even before the paper which is the topic of my latest post appeared, The Register attacked it. We must be doing something right.

They can’t possibly have read the paper, since it hadn’t even been posted when they posted their attack. Frankly, I doubt anybody with any sense cares about them.

But now that New Scientist has given a realistic report, it looks like commenters at their site want to torpedo the truth. What say we visit the New Scientists article, just to be sure that truth gets represented in the comments section?

Update: RealClimate mentions the paper, as well as a statement from the World Meteorological Organization emphasizing that this year (2011) will almost certainly end up as the hottest la Nina year on record.

The Real Global Warming Signal

Many different factors affect Global temperature. Fake “skeptics” like to claim that mainstream climate scientists ignore everything but greenhouse gases like CO₂, when in fact it’s mainstream climate scientists who identified those other influences. Natural factors cause temperature fluctuations which make the man-made global warming signal less clear, fluctuations which are often exploited by fake skeptics to suggest that global warming has paused, or slowed down, or isn’t happening at all. A new paper by Foster & Rahmstorf accounts for some of those other factors, and by removing their influence from the temperature record makes the progress of global warming much more clear.