For readers outside the UK, it is worth knowing a little context about the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is a newspaper in the loosest sense of the word. It is essentially a propaganda rag, flattering its readership by provoking their emotions on topics such as women in the workplace (which is a bad thing and gives them cancer), women not in the workplace (which is a bad thing and gives them cancer), the causes of cancer [1], immigrants, taxes and house prices. Bizarrely, for a publication with such a high female readership, it's remarkably misogynistic.<p>Typical readers are middle-aged to the elderly, who do not like having their assumptions challenged and find catharsis in the simplicity of the world as presented by the Daily Mail. The phrase "Daily Mail reader" has become shorthand for someone demonstrating characteristics such as ignorance, extremely simple viewpoints on complex situations, and bigotry poorly veiled under spurious numerical data or contextless "factoids".<p>[1] <a href="http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/</a>
Um, the real graph looks just as stagnant as the Daily Mail one.<p>The difference between them is barely even there.<p>Is anyone actually looking at the graphs on the blog, or are you just reading the title?
But the UK Met Office agrees with the Mail article author.<p>'We agree with Mr Rose that there has been only a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century. As stated in our response, this is 0.05 degrees Celsius since 1997 equivalent to 0.03 degrees Celsius per decade.'<p>And they correctly note -<p>'However, we do suggest that measurements over the longer-term are more representative of the trend in climate due to the influence of natural variability over shorter timescales.'<p><a href="http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/" rel="nofollow">http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-...</a>
I sometimes feel that papers or news/media outlets that do this should end up getting fined huge amounts and made to run public apologies (full page or TV) because its such a dangerous topic to mislead people on. That said, its no surprise its coming from the Daily mail.
I wrote a program to plot temperature data a while ago, although it's from the GHCN rather than the HadCRUT4 data set.<p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/</a><p>The square gridding method which they appear to have used in HadCRUT4 introduces problems with singularities, but even with a better gridding method the anomaly results are broadly in line with the conventional view about global warming.