Talk:David Whitehouse

On 2010-12-18, David Whitehouse comments: ''(I've removed this from the David Whitehouse page proper); it was in this version of the page. Anna Haynes 20:19, 19 December 2010 (UTC)'' "In the article I clearly state that 2010 will be an unexceptional year in that it will have a global average temperature statistically identical to all of the years in the past decade.

We live in the warmest decade of the instrumental era (post 1860). This decade is warmer than the 90's which was warmer than the 80's. However, it is now scientifically indisputable that the recent warming period ended about 2000 and that the global annual average temperature since then has been constant. We do not know the reason for this. This is actually not controversial at all. See for example the latest Climate Change brochure issued by the Royal Society, and the Met Office State of the Climate report in 2009.

All the measurements of global annual average temperature (in the Hadcrut3 database collated by the UK Met Office - the link is in the article along with the other two commonly used temperature databases, Nasa and Noaa. The data is clearly available) show the variation in the temperature of each year since 2001 to be smaller than the errors of measurement. Hence there is no statistical case to be made for a change post 2001.

In one database, Nasa, it is possible that 2010 will be a record (though still not exceeding the error bars of previous years and therefore not statistically significant) because of the El Nino that occurred in the first part of this year.

What I have said is not controversial and, as I say, accepted by most climatologists, although there are many commentators who are not up to date with the science.'