abb3w: I wonder if Gore would accept a Supreme Court appointment?

That would be good because then he'd know what the controlling legal authority was every time he shaved in the morning.

Skleenar: Pirate numbers actually are increasing in recent years. That graph is inaccurate.

It's also been getting cooler. They just need to update the graph; the pirate/temperature relationship holds.

Skleenar: You must live in the Southern Hemisphere.

Nope, just living la nina loca. That wasn't a comment on what's going to happen in the future, just an observation that even the five people on the planet who still think the Statue of Liberty will be up to her eyeballs in ocean by 2010 (the Goreacle is one of them, unless he's lying, which is of course also a possibility) agree that the short-term temperature trend since the 1998 high has been downward, and, as you say, the number of pirates has been increasing (even though they aren't the cool pirates with eye patches and parrots).

Skleenar: The red line is the annual global-mean GISTEMP temperature record (though any other data set would do just as well), while the blue lines

Jesus are you disaster fundies ever sensitive. I knew that, but I didn't realize that you are so sensitive that you have lost both your sense of humor and your ability to read your own links. There are two things you should know.

The first is that I was talking about freaking pirates!

The second is that your article agrees with what I said. I said that the short-term pattern over the last decade showed a cooling trend and I said that that trend was not indicative of the future. The entire point of the article you linked was that the short-term cooling trend was not, of itself, an argument against a longer-term warming trend (which is true). In other words, there IS a short-term pattern of cooling since 1998 which the article acknowledges AND that short-term trend does not say anything about any future long-term trend. In other other words, I was factually correct.

In other other other words, over the last decade the temperature has been falling and the number of pirates has been increasing. Over the longer term, the temperature has been increasing and the number of pirates has been decreasing. Those are not contradictory. However, what we do know is that one of the following will definitely happen: a) the temperature will resume increasing and the number of pirates will resume decreasing; b) the temperature will continue to decrease, dooming the planet to an increasing number of pirates; or c) the temperature will stay about the same and the number of pirates will stay about the same. So sayeth the FSM.

Ramen.