Sunday in the Washington Post, in the news:
predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased
more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering
self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists
said Saturday.
"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond
anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations,"
Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's
Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Sunday in the Washington Post, in George Will's opinion:
[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.
So Will concluded his misleading spew. (As one of my editors gently puts it: George Will is an Idiot.)
This is standard denier script, and — as most of my readers probably already know — it all goes back to the simple fact that we had a monstrously big El Nino event in l998, massively distributing warm energy from the Pacific around the world, and leading to a temperature spike that still stands as a highpoint in much of the temperature data (see James Hansen and the GISS).
Or, as the WMO said, contra Will:
The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by
greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008
are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to
2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface
temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.
[…] "For detecting climate change you should not look at any
particular year, but instead examine the trends over a sufficiently
long period of time. The current trend of temperature globally is very
much indicative of warming," World Meteorological Organization
Secretary-General, Mr Michel Jarraud said in response to media
inquiries on current temperature "anomalies".
The problem for Will is that even though he pretends to quote the World Meteorological Organization, he can't actually listen to what they say about the trend because that would make him look like, yes, an idiot.
(h/t: TPM)
Kit Stolz 