Credit: NOAA Climate gov. using NOAA NCEI data
Jan. 27, 2023
The warming trend in global temperature continued in 2022, which was the sixth-warmest year on record, according to a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But a viral tweet — using just a small segment of a NOAA graph — wrongly claimed the agency had announced a “global cooling” trend.
CIMES Deputy Director Gabe Vecchi, an AOS faculty member, explains why presenting only the last eight years of climate data out of the context of the longer-term trend — and without explaining that timespan included, first, a warming period due to El Niño and then a cooling period due to La Niña — is misleading.