Responding to the CO2 Coalition's "Fact #10" on When Modern Warming Began
CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #10 " claims that what they call "modern warming" began more than 300 years ago. In their words, "the current warming trend we are in began in the year 1695. The next 40 years had more than twice the rate of warming as we experienced in the 20th century. The first half of this 300-plus year warming had about the same amount of temperature rise as the latter half and was entirely naturally driven." The graph they use to support this claim is below. You may be noticing some recurring themes in the CO2 Coalition bag of tricks - in this case, to use local temperatures in place of global temperatures. They use Central England Temperatures (HadCET) instead of GMST datasets (either proxies or the instrumental record). HadCET isn't terribly reliable even for Central England during the early years of the dataset, and especially prior to 1772.[1] But data quality issues aside, Central England isn't and never has been the globe. T