Goddard has it exactly right. You should not treat a cycle as a linear trend.
The failure point is that the climate, while containing some cycles, is not, overall, a cyclic phenomenon. So his comment is not particularly relevant to climate.
However, I do agree that we should not rush to fit a straight line to everything we see. If you do fit straight lines you will get a trend. If you Fourier transform the same data you will get cycles. Neither "proves" anything.
Well it comes as no great surprise that Goddard is not his real name I half expected he would actually be Watts talking to himself. As to whatever obscure point he is trying to make I see no link to climate science it seems to be the ramblings of some one trying to make an in-joke, but just not actually being that funny.
On FSM's point of June 2014 for the Goddard claim of NASA manipulating data, sorry that claim is much older than that he made the claim years ago and seems to be just re-posting it, I deniers really have run out of things to say. Or are deniers now going to pretend they have not been talking about U.S temp in 1934 for at least 5 years.
Goddard (or whatever his name is) has been making a clown of himself for years and has in realty discovered nothing since, and except for die-hard deniers who is really convinced by someone who pretend they where someone else for years, is this your typical denier expert. Watts and other denier blogs have put him forward as an expert.
As I understand it now, even Watts is trying to distance himself from Goddard's claim, I guess he see's it does his credibility (sic) no good to be linked to a name changing fake.
How this is anything but a solid blow to the denier blog culture is not hard to see, but I'm sure deniers will do what they usually do and ignore it.
As GC suggested, there are cycles and other things that behave with different intervals so cycle isn't a very good word. Obviously we had warm period 2000, 1000 and today and cold period that ended roughly 300 years ago. Since the cold period it has been generally getting warmer with periods of minor cold since then. Alarmists like to start either in the late 1800s in a relative cold period or the 1970s in a relative cold period. If you start your graph there, it is going to give a skewed result and I believe that was the point.
Actually, the best-fit line to a cyclical sine wave as has been shown in the graph is a flat line with slope zero intercepting the y-axis at zero.
I wouldn't call Steven Godard a "dimwitted climate change expert". He is neither "dimwitted", nor a "climate change expert". His real name is Tony Heller, who runs the blog "Real Science. He has a BS in geology from Arizona State University and a Masters' Degree in electrical engineering from Rice University. [1]
However In June 2014, Goddard attracted considerable media attention for his claims that NASA had manipulated temperature data to make it appear that 1998 was the hottest year in United States history. In fact, he claimed, it was 1934, but NASA had started incorrectly citing 1998 as the hottest year beginning in 2000 Goddard had been promoting these claims for years before this, including in a chapter of a book by Don Easterbrook, but the mainstream media had not paid significant attention to it before then. Those who promoted the claim included Christopher Booker, in a June 21 article in the Daily Telegraph, and Fox News Channel host Steve Doocy three days later in a Fox and Friends segment. The claim was dismissed by Politifact.com, which rated it as "pants on fire"--its lowest possible rating. [1]
Maybe persisting in that false claim is foolhardy, but I wouldn't consider the man dimwitted, there are many here who have a lower IQ then he does, myself included...
no expert is dimwitted
only prob is dimwits who claim to be experts
Actually, it looks a lot more what deniers and other people with little mathematical background would do.
Isn't it deniers that claim everything is a "cycle" without providing the slightest bit of evidence for it? Has Goddard done a Fourier transform (does he even know what one is?) on some set of data and found the power spectrum? What is the data? What is the cause of the periodicity?
Steven Goddard has to be one of the all-time worst sources for information on the planet. Whoever reads that and thinks they're learning anything is being duped.
Geez, a Tony Heller blog post comprised of just 2 (TWO) sentences and a single unlabelled, unspecified graph. And don't get me started on the 'cyclical' claim.
Sadly, climate change is very true.
It is no accident that he does not present a single supporting example.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/remedial-mathematics-for-dimwitted-climate-experts/
Sure
