Mike,
“Global warming stopped in 1998.” is something I have heard quite often recently. This would be, to understate, a good thing if true so I decided to check. I downloaded NASAs global land-ocean temperature data-set.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
It gives global mean tempertaures with the mean 0f 1951-1980 as zero in 1/100 C units.
I plotted three-year annual meansfrom 1980 to 2007 (mean of 1980-82, mean of 1983-85 etc). Here are the recent years:
1985 9
1988 26
1991 28
1994 25
1997 42
2000 38
2003 53
2006 57
Still going up by these measures. This is a shame. 1998 was a vey hot year though. There has only been one year hotter since 1998 (2005), maybe this is the source of the claim. But there have been fewer cool years and this has kept three-yearly averages on an upward trend
David Evans says you can’t trust these numbers because of the urban heat island effect. Multiple peer reveiwed scientific papers say that there is no significant effect from urban heat islands on global temperature trend estimates. David Evans simply claims the opposite without refference to any evidence.
