Warming Slowdown? (Part 2)

guest post by Jan Galkowski

5. Trends Are Tricky

Trends as a concept are easy. But trends as objective measures are slippery. Consider the Keeling Curve, the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration first begun by Charles Keeling in the 1950s and continued in the face of great obstacles. This curve is reproduced in Figure 8, and there presented in its original, and then decomposed into three parts, an annual sinusoidal variation, a linear trend, and a stochastic remainder.

Figure 8. K...