USA Temperature: can I sucker you?

VW disputes this but I don’t know if they can be believed.

The history of the theory is perhaps relevant here. CO2-induced climate change was proposed in 1896[1], and shortly thereafter it was stunningly refuted, by multiple independent lines of evidence. Over the next fifty years, the soundness of that evidence was called into question, and eventually the weight of evidence was sufficient to shift the consensus. We have been trying to disprove AGW for more than twelve decades. At this point, we need a very large effect, because the H2O-CO2 feedback loop is pretty ugly, and the effect also needs to be small enough to not notice. There's not really any candidate theories beyond absurdities like, "everything we know about thermodynamics is wrong," or "CO2 molecules have free will and like to play practical jokes on scientists". Failing that, I'm deeply sorry to say that AGW is real.

[0] https://www.skepticalscience.com/christy-crock-6-climate-sen... [1] http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

I like that this piece makes clear how conscious choices of which data to present (and which not to present) can make an argument more convincing without actually lying. I don't like that it makes accusations about a particular person doing so without the courtesy of linking to the person being accused. If your argument is strong, it's usually better to let the reader judge for themselves whether your accusation is accurate. Failing to do so can undermine an otherwise strong argument.

I'm not familiar with Goddard/Heller. Searching for Tony Heller, I find https://realclimatescience.com. It includes a lot of graphs very similar to the ones Tamino dissects. The ones I saw were going day by day, looking at average temperatures for that day over the last 100 years. It's good to know that the start date might have been cherry picked to make the graph look better, and that this is based on raw unadjusted data, but it doesn't seem inherently unfair to use a particular day rather than the average for the entire year.

Is there a better "smoking gun" where he makes the more grandiose claims that Tamino accuses him of doing? Maybe, but without a direct link I wasn't able to find it. And in the absence of better evidence, as long as the graph is clearly labelled "Summer Average Maximum Temperature", I have to say that it seems unlikely that he's actually guilty of "claiming to show that temperature in the U.S. has been declining", and more likely that he is making the more direct claim that summer highs have not been increasing. Which given recent newspaper headlines, I do find to be an interesting counterpoint.

Searching for Steven Goddard, I find this: https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/who-is-steven-goddard/. I like that he clearly links his pen name to his real identity, and makes clear his scientific and environmental background, and admits that he is not actually a climate scientist. Does "Tamino" have a similar page? Who is he, and what is his background? It felt odd for one pseudonymous author to be calling attention to the fact that someone else was using a pseudonym. At this point, based on a tiny amount of research, I feel a little more comfortable with Heller/Goddard than with Tamino.

I'm not saying all these are ironclad facts, but this is what you're up against:

Alarmists have been wrong many times in the past. Cooling. Warming. 10 foot sea rise by 1980. No, 1990. No, 2000. No 2030, for sure this time. Alarmists have been caught manipulating data, for the express purpose of convincing people through deception, and the community was less than eager to own up to it. Alarmists cannot quantify how much of an impact man is having; attempts at measuring it lead to climate models, and climate models have only a slightly better track record than a bunch of stopped clocks at keeping time. Everyone knows that the earth has warmed and cooled since it existed. So everyone agrees that the world temperature changes constantly. But the alarmists can't quantify our impact with any accuracy, can't predict where it will go next with any certainty, but want everyone to drop everything to try to solve it. You see a problem that must be solved at all costs, they see a cult peddling politics and money in place of science, using clean water and air as a hook to reach the masses who all want those things too, but without wanting to join the cult.