Rahmstorf is now rubbishing statistical significance -- and thinks a few THOUSANDTHS of one degree Celsius are important



Stefan Rahmstorf is a  German oceanographer and big-time Warmist who got his doctorate in New Zealand! He writes very well and often in English and has been richly rewarded for it.  He is definitely a man who knows on which side his bread is buttered.

His oceanographic background does however make him skeptical of the usual but absurd Warmist claim that the deep oceans suddenly started storing "missing" heat 18 years ago.   So he has to deny that the heat is missing.  Hence his latest article: Recent global warming trends: significant or paused or what?". In other words, he  challenges the now generally accepted warming "pause". Consensus can be wrong, apparently.

I am not going to reproduce any of it as it is graphics intensive but, if you look, you can see that at the top of his figure 1 he gives the trend as 0.175 degrees Celsius per decade. The "5" in that figure is five thousandths of one degree.  I have long ridiculed Warmist use of hundredths of a degree and think that I asked rhetorically once whether they would get around to using thousandths eventually.  That day has come.  As Oscar Wilde often said, nature imitates art.

But his main point is that although there has been no significant warming in the 21st century, there HAS been warming.  It's just that the warming is not significant statistically.  That is a defensible statement.  There's a limit to what statistical significance tells us.  But he skates around WHY the warming is not statistically significant.  It is because the warming is TRIVIAL.  When you can show years differing only by hundredths and thousandths of one degree in temperature, you are showing warming that is for all practical purposes non-existent.  The statistical significance is, in other words, telling us something important.  We do well to heed it.

Nice try, though.  Warmism is one unending attempt to deceive -- JR.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).