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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Foster and Rahmstorf trends

University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) satellite record of the change in the temperature of the lower troposphere (TLT) for the time period 1978 to 2010, after the volcanic, solar, and El Niño influences were removed by Foster and Rahmstorf (2011). The data were smoothed with a 12-month running average, and the linear warming trend of 0.14°C per decade is shown. Also shown are the data and linear trends for two shorter time periods that exclude the El Niño year of 1998, with trends of 0.10°C per decade for 1978 to 1997, and 0.21°C per decade for 1999 to 2010. The shorter periods misrepresent the data in a manner known as "cherry-picking", by carefully choosing endpoints and choosing short time periods that are strongly affected by short-term noise that masks the underlying long-term climate signal seen in the full dataset. This graphic refutes the erroneous claim in a UAH press release that the TLT record just shows a step change with no warming before or after the 1998 El Niño event, rather than continuation as usual of the long-term global warming trend. Also see similar analysis and conclusions about the UAH data here.