North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Philip Stewart <philstewart24@yahoo.com>]

First let me say that I don't think political
discussions are appropriate for this list. Discussions
of global warming/cooling are, marginally anyway,
since anybody growing anything perennial has an
interest in what the climate's doing.

The article quoted ran in the London Daily Telegraph
on Sept. 4. Unfortunately, Bob Carter, the author,
engaged in same classic bad science cherry picking
(see, it is fruit related!) to come up with his
numbers. Why? Because his chosen start, 1998, was an
El Nino year, with record highs in many places, well
above even the existing upward trend line. This was a
single unusual data point, and yet Carter chooses this
as his point to reckon from. This looks suspiciously
like classic data manipulation, because there is no
other reason to pick 1998. Pick 1999, and suddenly
he's entirely wrong. Why pick 1998? I can't see any
reason except that it gives the result he wants. Why
not pick another arbitrary starting point? Most
commonly used for this sort of thing is 1978, when
global satellite temperature maps became available,
and that shows between .4C and .6C increase, depending
on how you calculate it. One can also go back to the
beginning of reliable daily weather data, sometime in
the 1880s. The warming trend holds up if we look at
the last 30, 50, even 100 years of data. Look at the
data yourself. 

I don't intend to engage in an argument over this,
since I think that would probably detract from what
this list is supposed to be about, however I just
wanted to point out to those who probably wouldn't
take the time to research this article themselves that
there are problems with this analysis. 

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