CHERRY-PICKING BUDAPEST CLIMATE DATA
FIGURE 1
Global Temperature Anomaly (°C) between 1988 and 2018
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by Robert Connell ('15)
The hottest temperature of July decreased despite another decade of emissions flowing into the atmosphere. So is all the excitement and concern in the news about the ancient forests of Amazon and Australia a waste of your time and cognitive capital? Is Greta just opportunistic? Is climate change just a hoax concocted by liberal elitists trying to further fill their coffers? Well, no.
page # 36 | The Bridge
Is climate change just a hoax concocted by liberal elitists trying to further fill their coffers?
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Choosing two dates and simply comparing them doesn’t show the full picture. The temperature is influenced by individual weather events, which (in the defence of weather reporters) are unpredictable, as countless factors drive weather changes in individual days, weeks and even months.
Instead, the accepted definition in the science community of climate change is a changing temperature trend over a minimum of a 30 year period. And although it is only 10 years since 2009, using appropriate, scientifically sound considerations, evidence shows that between 2009 and 2019 the average annual temperature in Budapest and the surrounding area has increased by 0.5°C. This brings Budapest to a total increase in temperatures of 1.8°C compared to the average temperature (called a baseline) between 1951 and 1980. Looking into the future, depending on how effectively we remove atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions, we can see Budapest facing temperature increases between 2.1°C and 5.9°C by 2100. What I tried to anecdotally illustrate above is one way in which sceptics attempt to cast doubt on climate change through specific selection of data that favours their view. This process is called cherry-picking and gained popularity in the late 00’s when data on global temperatures was selectively chosen to suggest that ‘global warming has stopped’.
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ast summer was my 10 year anniversary of arriving in Budapest for the first time. When I first set foot in Budapest, in July of 2009 at Keleti Pályaudvar, the first thing that struck me as I got off the train was the heat. It was well into the summer evening, it was dark, and yet the heat of the day still lingered. Looking back now, temperature data shows that the highest temperature in the month I arrived was 35°C. And yet last summer, a decade later in 2019, the highest temperature recorded in July was only 33°C.
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The period selected by sceptics, 14 years between 1998 and 2012 (see Figure 1), indicated that global temperatures had stagnated – casting doubt on the science of climate change. What had actually happened was a particularly strong warming event in the Pacific Ocean called El Niño, in 1998, which raised global temperatures significantly and made the following 13 years appear as if the globe were no longer warming.
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