The escalator rises again
By: Skeptical Science
One of the most effective, and successful, graphics developed by Skeptical Science is the escalator.
The escalator shows how global surface temperature anomalies vary with time, and illustrates how 'contrarians' tend to cherry-pick short time intervals so as to argue that there has been no recent warming, while 'realists' recognise that even though there can be short-term variability, the long-term trend clearly indicates the reality of global warming.
I remember when this first was published. It was useful for ending debates, both genuine and artificial.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The escalator rises again
One of the most effective, and successful, graphics developed by Skeptical Science is the escalator. The escalator shows how global surface temperature anomalies vary with time, and illustrates how "contrarians" tend to cherry-pick short time intervals so as to argue that there has been no recent warming, while "realists" recognise that even though there can be short-term variability, the long-term trend clearly indicates the reality of global warming.
A prominent example of the former was the one-time repetitious claim that it hadn't warmed since 1998, a year when there was a very strong El Nino. This claim persisted for quite some time, before - unsurprisingly - being dropped when it became clear that warming hadn't paused. However, this hasn't stopped others from making similar claims about more recent time periods, including, in 2019, a claim that we had just entered a cooling period. The escalator is a really nice way to illustrate the problem with such nonsense.
However, our escalator is now slightly dated. The original version went up until 2011, while the current version ends in 2015. We also noticed that Robert Rohde had updated the escalator and produced a staircase of denial. This motivated us to update our escalator, which we present below.
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There was a time when some people denied the reality of global warming.
Yes! Truly.
And there are many that still do.
For an article like this to "end the debate" about climate change on Newstalkers this would have to be a different forum than the one it is.
The only way to refute this graphic is to say its authors are liars.
No graphic can prevent bad faith, of course. Commenting off-topic over and over, until the original topic is buried and forgotten is a time-honored method on NT. I saw it just yesterday.
But let's not get derailed to meta.
And here I had always thought that an escalator was just a conveyance for people to access different floors. The article image is brilliant, and makes it damn hard to pooh-pooh the truth, although those most guilty of causing global warming are bound to do so. My biggest concern is that the movie The Day After Tomorrow isn't actually science-based and predictive.
Most catastrophe movies have weak science underneath. It's a timing problem: planetary-scale phenomena rarely fit into cinema.
I recently saw an analysis of Apollo 13, reputedly very accurate. The analyst pointed out quite a few things, but insisted that they were helpful in making a good story... which the movie certainly was.
I haven't seen the Emerich movie.