Worth Reading: NASA GISS’s “Global Temperature Trends – 2008 Annual Summation”

Introduction

NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies  (GISS) recent 2008 summary of global temperature trends is an excellent example of how effective charts and graphs can help communicate information on complex topics like climate change.

The report includes 7 charts, 4 trend charts and 3 color coded global images. This post looks at several of them to see how GISS uses charts to communicate climate trends.

Trend Chart and Global Image 

Figure 1: NASA GISS - 2008 Annual Summation

(link for pdf)

George Will’s Interpretation of Global Temperature Trends Is Flawed

“Within the lifetimes of most Americans now living, today’s media-manufactured alarm about man-made global warming might be an embarrassing memory. The nation will then be better off because Bush—during whose administration the embarrassing planet warmed not at all—refused to be stampeded toward costly “solutions” to a supposed crisis that might be chimerical, and that, if real, could be adapted for considerably less cost than will be sunk in efforts at prevention.” George Will,  Newsweek,  1/17/09

George Will’s  claim about recent global temperature trends is similar to others: 

1. There Is a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998 - Bob Carter in Telegraph, 4/16/06
2. Has global warming stopped?  by David Whitehouse in New Statesman, 12/19/07.

What’s the situation? Have  George Will, Bob Carter and David Whitehouse interpreted the temperature trends correctly? This post looks at the long term global land and sea temperature anomaly trends to evaluate the accuracy of  Mr. Will’s statement.  

Worth Reading: New York Times Says “Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power”

Ashleee Vance of the New York Times wrote an article on R on January 7, 2009 (link1). He then wrote a follow-up “R You Ready for R” on January 8, link2.

These articles have created a stir in the R – SAS world. Andrew Gellman has three posts:  post1, post2 and post3.  The NYTimes articles and Andrew’s posts  generated quite a few comments that are worth reading to see various views on R, SAS, and other statistical analysis tools.