The same geniuses who forecast a mild winter the last two years (and a few barbecue summers) warn that the tropics can’t handle warm weather.
A “largely ice free Arctic summer” is ludicrous. Even if you believe that the Arctic could be ice free at the Autumn equinox, believing in an ice-free July is beyond stupid. The map below shows the record low extent from July 15, 2007.
Is the divine presence a Republican? Or is He/She/It running an inter-galactic fossil fuel conglomerate? As His name doesn’t feature on the exxonsecrets site, the Congressional funding database or any of the other sponsored denier lists, we’ll never know, but whatever the explanation may be, the Paraclete appears to be as determined as any terrestrial corporate frontman to prevent a successful conclusion to the climate talks.
God is conspiring to stop the good work of Hansen et al.
How do I know? Because every time anyone gets together to try to prevent global climate breakdown, He swaths the rich, densely habited parts of the world with snow and ice, while leaving obscurer places to cook.
These places must be very obscure, because I can’t find them on the NOAA anomaly map.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation has just reported that 2010 is likely to be one of the three warmest years on record. Combining the WMO’s database with the temperatures measured by the US agencies Nasa and NOAA gives this year a ranking so far of equal first or equal second. But you’d scarcely believe it if you live in northern Europe or parts of the US, where (alongside a few anomalously hot ones) we’ve been hit by a series of freakishly cold weather events.
Just because we have all been freezing in record cold for the last two winters is no reason to believe they were not the hottest ever.
Most of the world may be begging for some promised global warming in a few weeks.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a.fnl.anim.html
One hundred years ago, when CO2 was less than 300 ppm, and more than 50 ppm less than Hansen’s “safe and stable” 350 ppm.
More than 1,700 forest fires were burning at the same time.
It was the largest forest fire in American history. Maybe even the largest forest fire ever. No one knows for sure, but even now, it is hard to put into words what it did. For two terrifying days and night’s – August 20 and 21, 1910 – the fire raged across three million acres of virgin timberland in northern Idaho and western Montana. Many thought the world would end, and for 86, it did. Most of what was destroyed fell to hurricane-force winds that turned the fire into a blowtorch. Re-constructing what happened leads to an almost impossible conclusion: Most of the cremation occurred in a six-hour period. A forester named Edward Stahl wrote of flames shooting hundreds of feet in the air, “fanned by a tornadic wind so violent that the flames flattened out ahead, swooping to earth in great darting curves, truly a veritable red demon from hell.”
The image above overlays the NCDC five year running mean of Louisiana (red) Texas (pink) Maine (green) and Pennsylvania (blue) with the y-axis normalised. Note that the current period of warming is unprecedented. We would have to go back over 50 years to see temperatures warmer than the present, back to a time when Dinosaurs, Elvis and Arnold Palmer ruled the planet.
(Of course, if we removed the 0.6 degrees that have been added on to recent temperatures by USHCN, there would be almost no warming.)
Also note that all the states show the debunked period of global cooling in the 1960s – which peer-reviewed research shows never happened.
Monbiot complains that it is cold where the rich people live and warm where the poor people live. (I wonder if that is factored in to GCMs?)
If he were thinking like a good socialist, he would realize the opportunity to redistribute wealth by forcing freezing rich people to vacation in poor countries with a nice climate.
Or even better, he could leave all of his clueless ideas behind.
Like many other states, Pennsylvania was warmest from 1930-1950, temperatures dropped precipitously during the peer-reviewed imaginary period of global cooling in the 1960s, and then warmed back up a little until the late 1990s. The hottest year in Pennsylvania was 1921
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftVDI8522p0]
