About That Global Warming Story -- 2012 Being the "Hottest Year" in the US

Updates

Later, 8:41 pm est: temperatures could hit record lows in southern California tonight. That forecast for a one- to two-degree rise in global temperature over the next century looks more and more shaky.  But look at this: it's only been a few years since it was this cold (2007).

Crops and other sensitive vegetation could be killed by the cold. The area hasn’t seen such low temperatures since 2007, said Bonnie Bartling, a weather specialist with the National Weather Service. 

"They" say global warming quit 16 years ago. Maybe.

And speaking of cold: wow, it looks cold in Denver where the Baltimore Ravens just defeated the Broncos. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. What a great game. What a great country. 

Original Post

Earlier I posted that I would be getting back to this story: "Our 'hottest year' and Al Gore's epic failure."

Said the New York Times climate blog, in an assertion that was echoed throughout the media: "The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but 2012 blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit."

Really? If that were true, then hair-on-fire news should have been the fact that 2012 was 2.13 degrees hotter than 2011. That's a far more dramatic change, and in a single year.
Nor was it mentioned that 2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006. Or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.

Are you getting the picture? None of this was mentioned because it makes a mockery of using trends in the Lower 48 as a proxy for global warming, the misguided intent that permeated media coverage of the NOAA revelation. 

Whether one "believes" in global warming or not, federal bureaucracies with a political agenda are concerning. 

I also noted this in my initial comments regarding the NOAA story:

The contiguous United States isn't the globe. It isn't even the United States, omitting Alaska and Hawaii. The Lower 48 represent just 1.58% of the total surface area of the Earth. The law of large numbers is at work here: The smaller the sample, the more volatile its patterns compared to a larger sample. And the fact remains, in all the authoritative studies, the warmest year on record globally is still 1998 and no trend has been apparent globally since then.

Until this week, the media's previous favorite way to evade this reality was to report, as a joint CBS/New York Times broadcast did on a recent Sunday morning, that the past decade was the "hottest decade ever recorded."

Uh huh. Because year-to-year changes in global (as opposed to contiguous U.S.) temperature are indeed teensy, it would be astonishing if the decade following the warmest year on record were not the warmest decade on record. But the appeal of this formulation is that it allows the media to talk about global warming in our time without mentioning that, ahem, global warming has ceased in our time.

Is climate warming getting ready to resume? Possibly. Is man's contribution to climate change significant and worth worrying about? Possibly.

Go to the link to see Al Gore's epic failure. It is also counter-intuitive. But predictable.