This was naturally picked up by denialists and served up on my Google feed. Of course it has no significance unless repeated ad infinitum and matched by similarly cold temperatures elsewhere. When this sort of thing happens I usually find that it has been exceptionally warm somewhere else, curiously enough often further north.

Sure enough, in the autumn a little further north, the temperature was 5C warmer than usual in the Arctic. If you follow the link to the Arctic Report Card for 2008 you find some other negatives including records set in both the duration and extent of summer surface melt in Greenland. It seems that the ice sheet lost at least 100 cubic km (24 cubic miles) of ice. Not good.

There was a link provided in a comment to Pachauri’s 2008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture. If you go to about 16 mins into the video you come to the part in question.

He says that that global surface temperatures increased by 0.74C in the 20th century. If you draw a trend line through the 20th century graph and then draw another one through the last 50 years of the century you’ll notice that the trend is increasing at roughly double the rate in the second case, he says.

This is the simple unadorned truth.

But unless you assert as Duffy and co require that the graph has been flat for the last 10 years you are guilty of a heinous crime.

Duffy should settle down and first explain to us why these graphs track each other so closely over hundreds of thousands of years and then have a look at Hansen’s explanation of the last 65 million years or so.

We’ve had a distinct pattern here of the autumns becoming very dry, starting as early as February, and then depending on what seem to be exceptional events for most of our winter rain.

T Rex, you’ve made my day. A couple of weeks ago I heard Duffy interview Lindzen so you can download the audio if you’ve got nothing better to do. Or follow the link to Lindzen’s paper where you can download a 36-page pdf and see:

how political bodies act to control scientific institutions, how scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how opposition to these positions is disposed of.

Yet Hansen complains of missing out on funding because he won’t tell his political masters what they want to hear.

Lindzen is rejecting the use of models as unscientific. My impression is that if you did your science his way you’d never be able to make decisions on mitigating GW before it was too late.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/michael-duffy/truly-inconvenient-truths-being-ignored/2008/11/07/1225561134617.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

What was really galling was the way it was featured on the front of the web site this morning.

I should have looked to see what I had bookmarked, where there was this story from early July of the connection with Charcot Island hanging by a thread. There is some comment here and now I’ve found an animation.

Surely the bridge cannot last the summer. Has anyone heard anything more recent?

The bottom line, however, is whether the continent is losing ice in net terms, and whether West Antarctica becomes seriously destabilised.

I’ve been following your climate change posts here on LP over many months with great interest and mounting alarm. Please don’t take this comment as disrespectful, but the term ‘bellwether’ arises from the practice of shepherds to put a bell around the neck of a castrated male sheep (‘wether’) so the sound would alert them to where the flock could be found in conditions of darkness, inclement weather, steep topography or thick undergrowth. Wethers are, like steers and indeed MSM op-ed writers, unadventurous and content to remain with the herd at all times. Their infertility is another point of similarity with MSM op-ed writers, come to think of it.

There ain’t no such word as ‘bellweather’.

End of pedantic comment.