How Hadley chart buries non-warming

Finally, again, the Hadley Centre is stuck with a bunch of numbers that show the planet isn’t warming, despite its computers’ predictions that human CO2 would warm things up. It can’t sweep this data under the rug so it does the next best thing: it produces a graph that makes the lack of warming barely discernible. Here’s the chart the Hadley Centre uses to illustrate temperatures (actually, temperature anomalies) over the last 157 years:

Hadley Centre temperature data, 1850-2007

The current flat-lined warming shows as a tiny, horizontal tail on the right side of the chart. If you get out a magnifying glass, you’ll see that, yes, the blue temperature line flattens out after the year 2000. I’ve searched the Hadley site and can’t find any graphic that shows the last 10 years in detail, although the numbers are there as a long list.

However, on his site, Anthony Watts has produced a graph of the past 10 years, using the Hadley Centre’s numbers.³ Here’s what that graph looks like (I’ve added a red line to show average temperatures).

Anthony Watts chart, 1988-2008, from Hadley Centre data

Why hasn’t the Hadley Centre produced a graphic like this? Isn’t an average temperature that hasn’t gone up in 10 years worthy of public attention? Shouldn’t even a temporary pause in warming be good news? Why bury that news in a tiny fillip at the end of a very long-term chart? Why work so hard to hide the truth?

Because the truth doesn’t agree with the Centre’s hypothesis that humans are the “driving” force behind climate. In short, it’s an embarrassment, and therefore to be underplayed as much as possible.

I argue that much of what the public is told by “consensus” climate science about global warming is misleading, exaggerated, or plain wrong.

The Hadley Centre’s spin effort isn’t exaggerating the data (far from it), nor is it plain wrong — the true figures are on the site. But the Centre is doing everything it can to mislead the public in hopes that the planet will start warming again before the peasants figure out that, maybe, the “consensus” climate science prophets are, in fact, plain wrong.

Notes

1. See Steven Goddard, “Painting by numbers: NASA’s peculiar thermometer,” available at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/print.html ↩
2. Available at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/2.html. You can find all the other “facts” on the same set of webpages. ↩
3. Available at http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/january-2008-4-sources-say-globally-cooler-in-the-past-12-months/