"The Hottest Year Ever is a bit overdue, with unusually cold spring weather in much of the northern hemisphere and an early autumn in the southern.
In our globalized world, we are not surprised to have the Japanese Meteorology Agency informing us about weather in France, Ireland and Finland.
... there’s been no warming in those places in March over 30 years.
Meanwhile University of Alabama Huntsville satellite data tells us globally this April is not warmer than 20 years ago or, indeed, the late 1980s.
... But then, to no one’s surprise, we’re told to pay no attention to that thermometer outside the window because “the Earth” is heating relentlessly even if its constituent parts, geographic or temporal, are lagging.
We don’t know with much precision what temperatures were like in the past.
(see charts at end of article)
... the science of temperature reconstruction is not “settled”.
But as far as we can reconstruct them, temperatures have fluctuated and the modern warming is not unusual either for its extent (at least so far) or its pace.
And again, the issue is not whether the world has warmed in the last 150 years, which it easily could and indeed almost certainly would have done because of a natural rebound from the Little Ice Age. It’s whether the warming is clearly largely man-made and whether it’s accelerating.
And whether we know.
The New York Times thinks so.
... The Times of course drags in extreme weather:
“Updated every 10 years, the normals are used by TV meteorologists when they tell you that today’s blisteringly high temperature was 10 degrees above normal for that location and date, for instance, or that a single heavy downpour brought more rain than is typical for an entire month.”
But ... the warming has been going on since 1900, long before man-made CO2 became a significant factor or the CO2 ppms started rising.
(a) strong mid-20th-century cooling that lasts, in the southeast in particular, into the 1981-2010 period.
Meanwhile the precipitation map shows some increase from the 1930s on, hardly surprising, but a decrease in the most recent period.
As usual, the actual data show a very complex picture of cyclical as well as linear trends, and of great uncertainty about past data.
And as usual, it’s served up as proof positive that only fools and rogues could express doubt about the urgent man-made “global heating” crisis."
