>A number of people that disagreed with anthropogenic climate change were adamant that a number of scientists had decreed that the world was, in fact, getting c

>A number of people that disagreed with anthropogenic climate change were adamant that a number of scientists had decreed that the world was, in fact, getting cooler. I asked them for sources, and several sources were put forth. In every instance, the sources they provided were in agreement that the world was, in fact, getting warmer (I'm not sure of any scientist that would say otherwise when looking at the past 150 years). Wait, what? Whether the world is "getting cooler" or "getting warmer" depends entirely on the timescale you choose to look at. On a million-year scale it's "getting cooler" - it was warmer 5 million years ago than it is today. It is also "getting cooler" if you look at a much shorter scale, say, over the last decade. Are you sure they weren't talking about one of those? Here's the (cooling) trend for the last decade: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/last:120/plot/hadcrut3vgl/last:120/trend http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/last:120/plot/ha... (the woodfortrees index combines several standard data sources into a single static metric; it is calculated as: mean(GISTEMP-0.35, HADCRUT3VGL-0.26, RSS-0.10, UAH).) I think the problem is with your terminology. To say we've gotten warmer implies it happened over some specific (albeit unspecified) measured timeframe. But to say we're getting warmer implies it's happening right now. In theory we could switch from getting warmer to getting cooler in a single year. There is no objectively preferable time window to judge it. You're free to prefer 30 years or 150 years, but that's an arbitrary choice - the fact that you can find some windows over which warming has happened doesn't mean warming is happening now. There's no inconsistency between believing "it has gotten warmer" and "it's not currently getting warmer". If they claimed the latter and you looked for evidence of the former, you haven't even shown a contradiction, much less "denial".