I am not sure that your referenced graph proves your point though. As with most temperature average graphs, this one shows a local high in the mid 40s which drops for a few decades to a low and then a steady climb to the end of the century where it goes relatively flat for about a decade. If you look at the high and low extremes, you can see that for one year in the 40s and one year at about 2005, the temperature is just a tad cooler. While I am not saying that this is significant, this is a standard “fact trick” that skeptics often use (or a variation of this). Most skeptics talk about the warming from the 40s and not the warming from 1900 or 1970 since there was a multi-decade warming and then cooling in the the late 30s and then into the 60s. Conversely, Gore followers almost exclusively talk of warming from the 60s or 70s and rarely discuss the cooling period in the 50s.

Regardless of this small “trick”, it doesn’t appear that warming was a full 1 degree that you state. I don’t see any link to the raw data behind the graph but the 10 year average in the 40s visually appears to be somewhere just less than .5C. The ten years from 1996-2006 visually appears to be somewhere between 1 and 1.2C (once again, this is a visual approximation – without the raw data I am not sticking to these numbers). That would leave a rise of about .6-.8C.

I go back to the first statement though. SPPI says that it was 1C cooler and I can’t find that reference. I am not saying that they are wrong just that I don’t believe it and considered their statement to be spin. AIT definitely spun their comments in this area as well.

Acutally, SPPI said the Arctic cooled 1 C in the last 60 years. Here is the quote:

“Gore does not mention that the Arctic has been cooling over the past 60 years, and is now one degree Celsius cooler than it was in the 1940s”

I refer you to Fig. 5.2 in ‘State of the Climate in 2006’, Special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol 88, No. 6, June 2007, which shows the Arctic has warmed about 1 C in the last 60 years (1946 to 2006). This section of the Supplement was written by Overland et al. and I found it in about 3 minutes with a Google search. See http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/atmosphere.html . Not sure what this has to do with ice bound ships and spin. SPPI is just plain wrong. Apparently they aren’t sufficiently competent to read a simple graph.