Steve Goddard, or as I like to call him, Dorothy (because Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz is his avatar, and I think he might live in Oz) is one of those science deniers who now and then produces a graphic that shows that global warming isn’t real. He is increasingly being ignored by even the ingenuous, but his latest attempt to deny reality has been slapped down so effectively by scientist and blogger Tamino that thought you should see it.

I’m just going to give you a little bit of the story, and then send you to Tamino’s excellent post.

First, here is Goddard’s graphic attempting to show that global warming is not real.

See how temperatures are going down? How can that be? Note that this is average maximum temperature over time, 1918-present, in the US.

Why 1918 (the data set goes back farther)? Why the US? Also, why is he using absolute temperatures instead of the usually used anomalies? Maybe he knows something we don’t know. Or, maybe he is counting on his audience not knowing some stuff that all the experts know.

Now look at this graph, produced by climate scientist Tamino.

That’s a silly graph, isn’t it. It appears to show the mean latitude of something over time. Of what? Of the stations used to estimate temperatures. How is this relevant to the present discussion?

To learn more about climate change, see this.