No, global warming hasn't stopped (part 94)

Fashionably late to the party as always, but (in contrast to Stoat's snark) I thought this was a pretty well-done piece by Seth Borenstein:

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

No prizes for guessing which "provocative book" he is talking about, and of course the "global warming has stopped" meme has been kicking about the delusionosphere pretty well for ever (eg see here). What he did was quite neat - sending off the time series of temperature data to a bunch of statisticians without telling them what it was, and asking them for their analysis. I would have preferred to disguise the data in some way (any linear transformation) but that's a bit of a nit to pick. Of course the statisticians gave the same answer that all competent climate scientists have already given, cos this stuff is hardly rocket science and there is no evidence for a marked drop in trend (mind you, the models suggest the trend should be accelerating, not just continuing). Cutting-edge science it is not, but it is an interesting and well-constructed news feature.

Best comment prize goes to Deep Climate, in the thread to Stoat's post

RP jr didn't write about it, so it must be right.

Sad but true.

Gavin Schmidt can be spotted highlighting the chances of a new temperature record next year. Obviously he's been reading McLean et al's ground-breaking paper where they show for the first time that ENSO affects global temperatures :-)

I've been keeping an eye on the ENSO forecasts recently myself, not because I care about ENSO itself - I don't think it has much of an effect here (cue Japanese scientists telling me how important it is) - but rather due to its likely effects on global temperature. The Hadcru temperature anomaly has been about +0.5C for the last few months, and the old 1998 record was +0.526C. The weekly pdf updates presented on this page give an accessible summary of recent ENSO status and predictions. According to it, the ENSO is "expected to strengthen and last though Northern hemisphere winter". It is almost certainly late now for this year to break any records, but given the lag of about 6 months in ENSO's effect, every extra month of positive ENSO index from here on means additional warmth next year.