> If you were trying to determine if the quantity of daylight increased over a week in spring, would you account for the differences caused by day and night? What about cloud cover? Or is that just massaging the data?
Just to draw a better analogy to the low quality of the current work, let's say you wanted to compare average daylight last week, globally, to all of recorded history. Then you made a model that had terms for (say) astronomical daylight, longitude, latitude and, I dunno...altitude of the measurement. Then you made a regression, subtracted three terms, and claimed that the residual was still "significantly darker". Then you run around waving your arms and shouting that if we only extrapolate forward N weeks from last week, soon we'll be living in a fully dark world!
You'd be rightfully laughed out of any room you were in.
I think you are missing my point, and the point of the article: they are demonstrating that global temperature change that is not driven by volcanism, solar variation or El Niño is (in all likelihood, given the data) accelerating. They can do this because the effects of volcanism, solar variation and El Niño on global temperature can all be predicted from external measurements.
Just to draw a better analogy to the low quality of the current work, let's say you wanted to compare average daylight last week, globally, to all of recorded history. Then you made a model that had terms for (say) astronomical daylight, longitude, latitude and, I dunno...altitude of the measurement. Then you made a regression, subtracted three terms, and claimed that the residual was still "significantly darker". Then you run around waving your arms and shouting that if we only extrapolate forward N weeks from last week, soon we'll be living in a fully dark world!
You'd be rightfully laughed out of any room you were in.