A few weeks ago David Rose of The Telegraph made a stir, claiming that global warming had been nil over the last 16 years.
It was complete crap, not worthy of a so-called journalist.
What was that claim based on? Only this:
This is a plot of the slope (linear trend) of the HadCRUT4 surface data, from the indicated date to the present.
So, from January 1990 to August 2012, the linear trend is 0.144 C/decade, with a 95% confidence level of 0.024 C/decade due to uncertainty of the statistics of linear regression. (HadCRUT4 does give the measurement uncertainty of each data point, but they quickly become less than the statistical error -- for the 20-yr slope the measurement uncertainty is about 0.002 C/decade, while the statistical uncertainty is 0.015 C/decade.)
The "true uncertainty" is the square root of the sum of the squares of these two numbers, which is essentially just the statistical uncertainty (plotted above).
So David Rose's claim of no global warming is dependant on this small, tiny, temporary period between 1997 and 1998 where the 95% CL error bars reach barely into the x-axis.
That's all. That's it.
That's why Tamino calls Rose a cherry-picker -- justifiably.
You really have to wonder how some people sleep at night. You really do.