Under the headline “New Study Thoroughly Debunks Global Warming, Will Media Notice?” global warming denier Noel Sheppard writes in a July 11 NewsBusters post of a new study he claims, yes, debunks global warming.
Of course, it does no such thing. As Media Matters details, the study, in the journal Nature, estimated temperatures going back 2,000 years by analyzing the density of tree rings taken only from northern Finland and Sweden, and the record they produced only reflects temperatures between June and August. There’s nothing “global” about the study.
Further, the study doesn’t cover the past 100 years, which Sheppard sorta admits by including a graph in his post showing a sharp rise in temperatures in the past century.
Sheppard seems to know that the facts don’t live up to his screaming, overstated headline. By the second paragraph of his post, he was already altering what he claimed the study found, that it “completely debunks all previous claims that temperatures in recent decades are in any way historic.” But if he looked at that graph, he would see that the rate of temperature in the past century is arguably surprisingly rapid for such a short period of time, especially compared with the slow overall rate of decline the graph shows over the previous centuries.
As is his wont, Sheppard took a cheap shot at Al Gore, calling global warming “Nobel laureate Al Gore’s favorite money-making scam.” Sheppard didn’t say how much money he has made by being a professional denier.