News Updates

It was relatively cool over CONUS in December, but not closet to record-shattering, as NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported (see below). And, as Capital Climate notes, this 14th coldest December followed the third warmest November.

Also, Alaska had its 17th warmest December. It’d be nice if NCDC would combine the two in reporting, since Alaska is getting baked these days.

It was a relatively warm year (again), part of a long-term warming trend even over the tiny fraction of the Earth that CONUS covers, as NCDC reports:

So, no, we’re not cooling, as inaccuweather meteorologist Bastardi asserts, not even in the contiguous United States. If you’d like to see just how non-record-breaking December was for CONUS, here’s the chart:

We should get the global data for December and the entire year next week from NOAA and NASA, and again it will be crystal clear that the climate system as a whole is warming unequivocally.

For more, see WWF’s “For First Decade of the 21st Century, U.S. Annual Temperatures Remain Above Normal.”

Related Posts:

The hottest decade ends and since there’s no Maunder mininum — sorry deniers! — the hottest decade begins
“Experts: Cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming”
Was the “Blizzard of 2009″ a “global warming type” of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?
Looks like I’m going on FoxNews today because it’s cold outside
Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Levitt “said he does not believe there is a cooling trend”!!

From Rupert Murdoch to Warren Buffett to, yes, John McCain January 9, 2010

Rolling Stone has two pieces on climate politics in its latest issue, by Jeff Goodell and Tim Dickinson. “Planet Earth 911” is on “Big Oil and Big Coal’s lobbying campaign to block progress on global warming,” and “The Climate Killers” is on Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Jack Gerard, Rex Tillerson, Sen. Mary Landrieu, The Swift Boat smearer, Inhofe, David Ratcliffe, Dick Gephardt (!), George Will, Tom Donohue, Don Blankenship, Fred Singer, Sen. John McCain (!), Rep. Joe Barton, Charles and David Koch.

I don’t agree with either piece 100% but they are well worth reading, and not just because the latter piece quotes me a couple of times. Rolling Stone deserves a huge amount of credit for continuing to put out first-rate work on the story of the century.

Let’s look a little closer at three of RS’s “climate killers,” starting with Buffett:


The Profiteer
Warren Buffett
CEO, Berkshire Hathaway