With fear and trepidation. I am loathe to provoke Tamas Calderwood into another outburst of correspondence but I cannot resist showing this graph from the NASA dataset:
Last month, you will notice, tied with May 1998 as the hottest May on record. That followed April 2010 being the hottest ever April recorded and the period January to May this year was the warmest in 131 years. Yet in Crikey yesterday Tamas Calderwood asked “If man-made CO2 is dangerously warming the planet, why wasn’t the current El Nino warmer than 1998’s?” Well, there’s your answer. It has been.
And to proffer further ammunition for the next attempt to defend the indefensible I look forward to an explanation as to the lack of significance of these two climate happenings.
The Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University reports a record low snow cover in the entire northern hemisphere for the month of May.
And to r0und out today’s selection there’s that graph of Arctic sea ice extent showing (the red line) that it keeps reaching new lows.
Following an Australian path. As I read how the British Liberal Democrats are relishing their role as part of a let’s-show-them-we’re-tough government I cannot help but recollect what happened when their Australian third party counterpart decided to show that it could be economically responsible. From the moment the Australian Democrats sided with the conservatives to introduce a goods and services tax they went into a terminal decline.
The reason was not that their support was irresponsible but that it ignored the fact that their electoral support came much further from the left than the party proposing the change. I will not be at all surprised if the Liberal Democrats in the UK suffer the same fate for the same reason.
A funny kind of split. It is hard to see what the so-called Cabinet split that The Australian is writing about is actually meant to be. Simon Crean dares to makes the sensible observation that a bit more discussions with the mining industry before the announcement of the new super profits tax might have been a good idea and that is supposed to be a Cabinet divided? Give us break. That kind of egg-beater approach is what makes politicians so loathe to ever say what they think, no matter how obvious the comment might be.
“Crean speak” – I’m just surprised it hasn’t been interpreted, in Oz, as meaning “Julia Gillard should be PM, til Tony Abbott puts us out of our misery”?
Thank you for the reference to Tamas. I kind of hope that effective rules of engagement will be established which will limit the boring repetition of previously debunked notions, preferable before we all either doze off or switch off.
Regarding the NASA graphics, they were originally published about a week ago, with excellent accompanying narrative. I have mislaid the link, but interested readers would likely appreciate one.
Chill, read “Desiderata” – failing that, take out his batteries.
I will try and beat Tamas to the punch on the climate data. It is all about putting it into proportion:
1. As we aproach the peak of the normal interglacial cycle, saying that the temperature is the highest recorded for 13
Oops! WordPress had a fit.
1. As we approach the peak of the normal interglacial cycle, saying that the temperature is the highest recorded for 131 years is meaningless. What else would you expect? 131 years is a blip in time.
2. Again, record low snow cover *since 1968* is not impressive.
3. The red line in the Artic sea ice graph has indeed reached new lows (for the period since 2002) for 2 months, prior to that it hit a new high in April.
4. Since 1979 Arctic sea ice has been going down, but Antarctic sea ice has been going up! See: http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html
This whole debate is characterised by rampant cherrypicking.