Heads we warm, tails we cool

From Foxnews.com:

"...Is it getting cooler or warmer?

The answer, according to a new study, is that we need to concentrate on the long-term trend, which points to an overall warming tendency over these past hundred years.

The great majority of climate scientists agree that it's getting warmer in many places around the world. The cause, they also agree, is heat-trapping carbon dioxide produced by human technology.

But how does this square with the observed fact that over the past decade world temperature has actually stayed the same, or even gone down?

Two scientists, Michael F. Wehner and David R. Easterling, show that such decade-long fluctuations are quite common in weather history. From day to day, season to season, and year to year, the weather shows great variability thanks to natural factors like capricious wind patterns and ocean currents.

Changes in climate -- that is, changes in typical weather conditions over long periods of time -- are more difficult to assess."

But if it is difficult to assess, then how can one make an argument for or against Global Warming?

But let us continue:

Wehner, who works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., says that the long-term trend really is toward a warmer planet, but that a single year, 1998, has temporarily thrown off the overall upward march in temperature.

In that year, an immense transfer of heat from the western to the eastern Pacific occurred: El Nino (Spanish for "Christ Child"), which often coincides with Christmas time. An El Nino event can have a major impact on rainfall patterns and temperatures over several continents.

El Nino and other weather factors can cause a short reversal in the warming trend for a year. A 10-year reversal is less likely, but still possible. Just as in throwing a coin, seven heads in a row is unexpected, but it does happen now and then.

In the journal Geophysical Review Letters, Wehner says that even a period of 20 years of modest cooling -- the equivalent of throwing 20 heads in a row -- would not reverse the scientific finding that long-term world temperature is trending upward; the trend is based on data now stretching back more than a century.

So basically, our understanding of recent climate change comes down to...chance.

Climate scientists can claim the long term trend is toward warming, yet their best explanation for a short term reversal is mere chance?

By the way, do you know the odds of throwing 20 heads in a row? 1 in 1,048,576. The entire Global Warming theory comes down to odds that long?

It is safe to stop calling Global Warming a "theory", and start calling it a "lottery".