Coldest Winter In 57 Years

Tim Blair devotes his supremely snarky column in the Australian Sunday Telegraph to noting the coldest June since 1950 in Australia - continent-wide, mind you. He's spot on.

LAST month Australians endured our coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we've horked up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we're still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War.

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn't happening, or that we're causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it involves an entire freakin' continent's weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month, for Christ's sake.

No such foolishness will be indulged in here.

Sadly, those who believe in global warming - and who would compel us also to believe - aren't similarly constrained. A few hot days are all they ever need to get the global warming bandwagon rolling; evidently it's solar powered. Here, for example, is an Australian Associated Press report on May's weather, which in places was a little warmer than usual:

"Climate change gave much of Australia's drought-stricken east coast its warmest May on record, weather experts say.

"Global warming and an absence of significant cold changes had driven temperatures well above the monthly average, said meteorologist Matt Pearce.

According to Mr Pearce, May's temperatures were "yet another sign of the widespread climate change that we are seeing unfold across the globe."

If that's the case, shouldn't June's cold weather - coldest since 1950, remember - be a sign that widespread climate change isn't unfolding across the globe? We're using the same data here; one month's weather. And, in fact, the June sample is Australia-wide while May only highlights the east coast. Fear the dawn of a great "coldening"!

Britain is suffering through a summerless summer at the moment - and a darned wet one, too. There is a hot spell across much of the US, but it follows what was an unusually cold spring in many areas. In other words, there is a lot of weather. But as Blair notes:

Think of these little factoids the next time your read a report linking a hot day or month or year to global warming.

There are people dying of exposure in the snow down in Argentina and the South African leg of the global goregasm had lousy attendance do to extreme cold weather. Factoids can be terrible things.

categories Environment, Junk Science, Left Wing, Media | Gaius Saturday, 14 July , 2007

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