Global Warming My Eye

Maybe you wouldn't say that if you were in Southern California, but it is freakin' freezing here. And to be honest, it actually has been a pretty mild winter thus far for Utah. BUT, it's still technically fall so I'm not going to conclude that this winter can't still, in fact, be pretty dang cold.

I came across a couple of global non-warming articles today. This one talks about how the Chinese essentially vetoed a New Kyoto agreement by suggesting that the participating "rich" countries should hand over $300 billion to subsidize the costs for impoverished countries. A couple of points from the article:

• Global thermometers stubbornly refused to rise after 1998, and have plummeted in the past two years by more than 0.5 degree C.
• The world is now colder than in 1940, when the Post-WWOII Industrial Revolution started spewing lots of man-made CO 2 in the first place.
• On October 29, the U.S. beat or tied 115 low-temperature records for the date. Alaska, which was unusually warm last year, recorded 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit that night—beating the previous low by 4 degrees F. London had snow in October for the first time in more than 70 years.

And from Powerline, they cite an AP article and then add some more commentary:

In the face of the current cooling trend, global warming alarmists have naturally gotten more hysterical than ever. This Associated Press article is typical: "Obama left with little time to curb global warming." Personally, I think Obama has a much better chance of walking on water than changing the weather. But the AP plods doggedly on:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid. ...

The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

This displays a remarkable level of ignorance on the part of the Associated Press. Global temperature records are nowhere near accurate enough to rank years, over a period of centuries, with any confidence. For the recent past, though, we have the world's best data set here in the U.S. And it's true that at one time, it was widely believed that the 1990s were the warmest recent decade. But that was before it was discovered that NASA's James Hansen, Al Gore's chief scientific ally, had been fudging the data, either accidentally or on purpose. NASA was forced to correct its data, with the result that the ten warmest years on record here in the US are as follows: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939.

Don't buy the hype, as always.

UPDATE: It's snowing in Las Vegas today. Yes, Las Vegas, Nevada, not Las Vegas, North Pole. But that's because Las Vegas is sitting on top of a mountain, right? It's not unprecedented, but it's still very unusual.