Sixty Years of No Warming

I'm not sure what to make of this article by Tony Heller, but if he's right then NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has been behaving a bit irresponsibly with their data, and, contrary to the terrifying prognostications of folks like Al Gore, the specter of runaway global warming is a chimera.

The basic claim of Heller's piece is this:

In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included a graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record, but they only showed the last 37 years in the graph. The reason for the selective presentation of data is that the earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as post-1979 warming.

In other words, Heller is claiming that NOAA’s data actually shows that there's been no net global warming for 60 years. Given all the alarums raised by climate scientists and all the radical, and very costly, policy proposals promoted by the world's politicians this is quite a shocking claim that Heller is making. I urge interested readers to visit the site and peruse the graphs and supporting materials he provides.

Maybe someone who knows more about climate science can explain why his argument is wrong (or right), but for now it's very hard to accept the confident assertion, made by so many of our politicians from President Obama on down, that global warming is in fact "settled science."