The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate office, along with the UK’s Met Office, yesterday released their annual State of the Climate report. Some news agencies are leaping to tell us that the most recent decade, as NOAA underscores, was the hottest on record. Duh. Few would argue with that and it’s not news. The report, at a glance, says a lot more than that, and essentially all news agencies do report its other indicators that all say the Earth is warming – such as higher sea level, less sea ice, few glaciers, and higher humidity. The summary is garnering extensive coverage even though the report’s authors deliberately avoided any argument about why the Earth is warming.

However. The play given the  hottest decade bit of uncontroversial truth is not necessarily a convincing way to cross the climate “debate” off the list  of  things that informed people all across the spectrum think has substance. Yet, at the Australian, Paul Cleary puts it in his lede (under a hed saying Aussies are suffering among the worst roastings). The Wall Street Journal‘s Gautam Naik does likewise. AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid puts this in his second graph as his first specific message from the report.

If any of these reporters and others who did likewise hoped that stressing this aspect would persuade determined skeptics,  they are likely wrong and for a reason other than sheer stubbornness. Ditto for the press office at NOAA, which put out a release (see Grist) with the last ten year’s warmth its topper. The notion embraced by mostly-rightist doubters is that global warming peaked around 1998 and has been roughly level since then, ergo global warming has stopped. There is, to be sure, no rational reason to say that, as a glimpse of the temperature record shows a jagged, not steady line upward. But if that’s the assertion one wants to counter it won’t work. For the assertion itself conceded the last decade to have been warmer than any before. After all, if one spiked a fever an hour ago and it hasn’t gone down, this is probably the hottest hour one’s body has had for a long time – but it doesn’t mean the reading is still going up.

To truly confront the doubter’s analysis, one needs either to have evidence that the trend continued through the last decade, or mention that, stochastically, there have to be more or less flat decades even if the climate is headed for more warmth. Some outlets, such as National Geographic News‘s Christine Dell’Amore takes the first tack. She pointedly inserts a link to evidence that (while the NOAA report goes thorugh 2009) 2010 so far is on track to be the hottest, or at leasst near-hottest, ever. So the lurching march toward a seriously worrisome environment seems not to have stopped.

Other stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Global warming evidence is ‘unmistakable,’ ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: Ten key indicators show global warming ‘undeniable.”
• NYTimes (blog) John Collins Rudolf: State of the Climate: Hottest Decade on Record ;
• Time Magazine (blog)- Michael Lemonick: This Just In: The Earth is Warming! ; And Lemonick conceded his exasperation.
• Financial Times – Fiona Harvey : New climate data reignite debate ; It’s not a debate among experts, and the non-debate never went out. It’s sort of a muddle here what debate Harvey is talking about and how this reignited it. Her example of debaters on the skeptical side is one fellow from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His bio lists extensive political experience there as a professional conservative on environmental issues, but no particular training in pertinent fields. Her corresponding outside commenter from the “warmist” side of the aisle is a physicist and leader of a climate dynamics group at Oxford with a D. Phil in atmospheric, oceanic, and planetary sciences.
• Guardian (UK) Juliette Jowit: Global warming pushes 2010 temperatures to record highs ; She leads on this year, then turns to the report. Her remarks on US and UK figures and their details in variance shows – while she doesn’t report it deeply – she’s quite familiar with how the Met Office and NASA’s GISS in N.Y. handle global temperature stats differently.

Meanwhile, remember that igloo that was built for Al Gore outside the Capitol?

• Washington Post – Capital Weather Gang: Steve Tractor : D.C. record snow in 2010 not due to global warming ; Not global anything…

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA Press Release ; State of the Climate in 2009 ;

- Charlie Petit

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