The latest round was brought to my attention from DarkSyde, a science blogger at DailyKos. In an article he put up last night, he notes that an online mag called Daily Tech has a blogger who is claiming that last year was cooler than average… which contradicts a study by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies that shows that last year was among the hottest on record.

Which one is right? Duh. NASA. The Daily Tech columnist evidently confused a below-average January temperature for an entire year’s worth.

I like Bad Astronomy

But they have very very spotty (har har) evidence, and what they do have does not come close to explaining the rise in temperature we see on Earth.

A spot on observation by Bad Astronomy.
(I'm not British so I may be misusing the phrase)

well, if you pick the day with the highest temp in the past 10 years, then pick any day since then, you can say "hey look, it's cooling". similarly, if you pick the coldest day in the past year, and any day prior to that, you can say 'hey look it's cooling". for instance, it's clear that the earth is cooling, from measurements taken at noon yesterday to 4 am today.

I've mentioned this before, but I like the notion that it's about Global Weirding as much as it is Global Warming. Yes, warming may well be at the root, but even the most staunch of critics of that idea would have to agree that the world is just getting plain weird. We haven't seen a winter of snowfall like this in Milwaukee in a very long time. Spring has been coming and going in the blink of an eye. It seems that there is just wide-spread weirdness about the globe in many different areas of change from what seemed to be about 50 years of reliable status-quo world balance in my own memory. Warming or not, it's weird and it doesn't seem to be likely to get less so anytime soon.