Since he's been in the news I perused his website...and what did I find? An outright denial of human caused global warming, based upon a questionable-sounding argument (culled from some dude writing in The Telegraph) that I've never actually heard before:
Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Um...like I said, I've never heard this particular argument before, but I'm instantly suspicious. Notice anything odd about the particular time span discussed here? It happens to be bookended by the top two warmest years on record: 1998 (a strong El Nino year) and 2005. So I don't find it at all surprising to hear that if you only examine this particular time period, in isolation, you would find that the global average temperature had not significantly increased.
But what does that mean? Precisely nothing, as far as I can tell. Choose a broader range of years--like, say, 1970 to 2005--and you are going to see a significant temperature increase. In short, this argument proves absolutely nothing. No one is seriously arguing that global warming means that every single year must be warmer than the previous year....
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Yeah, Tim Lambert was talking about the original telegraph article a few days ago too, see http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/04/a_picture_is_worth_a_thousand.p…
Shows how out of it I am....good work, Tim.
well that doesn't negate the fact that John Lott published it on his website. It's absurd. When I work for a think tank, I'll use opinion pieces from the newspaper instead of scientific journals too.
Ahh! Chery-picking at its best.
What a remarkably foolish statement! Why bother looking at the isotopic records for the past many millennia when you can just look at the last few years' worth of data? Why stop there? Heck, based on temperatures here for the past couple of days, I predict it will get hellishly hot within two months.
That's what I was thinking too. It seems like he's playing on people's basic tendency to focus on the short term (e.g., lack of understanding of deep time when dealing with the evolution debate). 1998-2005 can seem like a long time, but on climatic scales, it's not that significant.
I wonder what Mary Rosh thinks about that? ;-)