Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.OK there, Dave. So, what's the conclusions you're drawing from the forecast then from heat being reflected harmlessly back into space by Al Gore's mass?
Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.
But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.
Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US Vice President Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.
But though it was still successfully trying to influence media headlines during Cancun last week by saying that 2010 might yet end up as the warmest year, the small print reveals the Met Office climbdown. Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C.
That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office's own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8 degrees, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat.
Right. 0.06 degrees compared to 0.8 degrees is huge! Warming is over! Al Gore is absorbing CO2! I mean that has to prove global temps are going down, right if it's 14.52 Celsius, yes?
The current record record is 14.52C (58.14F), which was set in 1998.
What these nimrods never understand is that Global Climate CHANGE is the issue, not WARMING; that was a mistake in semantics that scientists should have pushed back on, hard, from day 1.
ReplyDeleteThe reason why Britain and northern Europe are warmer than the same latitude in the N. American continent is a little something called the North Atlantic Circulation, a massive gyre of seawater that brings warmer southern waters up the west coast of Europe, to the North Sea, and down the east coast of N. America. The worry is that the melting of all the ice locked in the Arctic and Greenland is going to cause perturbations in this gyre (freshwater into seawater; issues result). If that gyre doesn't continue to bring warm sea water up the coast to Britain, it is going to get damned cold in jolly old, formerly-warmer-than New England, Britain.
So, every time one of these idiots says "see, it is actually colder in my country", they are quite likely on the leading edge of, and confirming global climate change. Let's watch as once again Faux Spews puts copies of Gore's book out in the snow in the next East coast blizzard; it's just like hearing Nero fiddle while Rome burns.