Jim Steele seems to be addicted to making up stuff. Today he wrote a long article for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT, picking on Katharine Hayhoe and Don Cheadle, who featured in the Years of Living Dangerously (which I haven't seen). Jim wrote a long article short on facts and long on his normal rejection of science (archived here). At one stage he wrote:
The truth is there has been no climate warming in Texas.
To support his claim he put up a chart that he described as "Plainview TX temperature trends found online from the US Historical Climate Network". I don't know why he stopped at 2012. Anyway, I've got a better chart if you want to know about Texas temperatures. It's a statewide chart, not just one small town in the north of the state. The data is from NOAA. I converted it from Fahrenheit to Celsius and plotted it as an anomaly from the twentieth century mean.
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| Data Source: NOAA |
You can see how much hotter it's been getting, consistently - in Texas. It's been hotter for longer for any time in the record going back to the late 1800s. Much hotter, with 2012 being nearly two degrees Celsius above the twentieth century average.
I can't be bothered going through the rest of Jim's diatribe. He does end up blaming Joe Romm for whatever Katherine Hayhoe said. Jim's a climate science denier. He's written a book about his denial. It pays to check every word he writes. What I suggest for anyone who's come looking to find out more about Jim Steele, you can type his name into the search box above. This is by no means the first time he's lashed out at scientists or misrepresented data.
You can read about how Jim doubled down when I pointed out he'd got his seas wrong and his seasons wrong. [Update: You can see Jim continues to "double down" in the comments below. Not once has he conceded that the NOAA data shows warming or that the paper he himself cited states that Texas has warmed (which it does). Not only does the paper state that Texas has warmed, it attributes some of this warming to human factors! Sou 2:10 pm AEST Thurs 17 April 2014]
Better yet, have a look at the Years of Living Dangerously and tell us what you think of it.
