Thanks to Ed Brayton and some other folks, FreeThoughtBlogs has been successfully moved to a new host, many thanks to those of you who witnessed our birth pains. So now we can rock and/or roll!

Mean global temperature by meteorological station. Source GISS

The image above shows the actual NASA Global Temperature Index by meteorological station produced by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies or GISS — in repsonse to the comment below, you can actually see what the annual numbers looks like here or tabulated and formatted in various visual presentations here. The raw data for this graph are empirical observations, temperatures around the world to be exact. After the highs in 1998 and 2005, climate change skeptics — many funded by the fossil fuel industry — proclaimed an era of global cooling was upon us and we can thankfully dismiss those biased scientists at NASA and elsewhere when they say otherwise. It’s a neat swindle; using that dishonest tactic every local or absolute maximum record temperature is by definition evidence for global cooling!

Now that the solid numbers for 2010 are in, they’re back to explaining the evidence doesn’t matter. Imagine what they’d think if that chart were upside down, no doubt they would clearly see a powerful, unmistakable cooling trend huh? With last year’s data in the graph, we can now add a new entry to the original climate change (denial) 101 apologetics by year and mean temperature visual aid. Here at the Zingularity we believe one good, or bad, turn deserves another. Presenting the unofficial climate change denial 101 game plan:

Climate change denial 101. Image work by my buddy DemFromtCT

So far the CRU hack seems to be the main spiel used to distract from the new data. Which in itself is a con because that event vindicated the scientists involved. Mike Mann, perhaps best known for the Hockey Stick paleoclimatic record and who was on the inside of that event, reminded me just now by email that, “There have now been a half dozen investigations by various independent organizations and commissions in the U.S. and the U.K. and in every case they have found that there was absolutely no evidence of scientific misconduct revealed in the fossil fuel industry-manufactured controversy known as ‘climate gate’. As the pre-eminent journal Nature editorialized about the theft of emails and subsequent smear campaign by industry-funded climate change deniers”: “The theft highlights the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate change researchers”.”

Needless to say, reality never stands in the way of a good zombie lie.