Bad news: It's nearly as warm as the 1930s!

Despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent worldwide to find and manufacture evidence of worldwide catastrophe, that recalcitrant evidence just resolutely refuses to surface. Instead, the bad news for warmists just continues to mount. Christopher Brooker summarises the latest four pieces of bad news for catastrophists:

• As I mentioned here in my weekend ramble, NASA's admission that their collection of temperature data was 'merely good enough for government work' and their subsequent correction of their surface temperature record has confirmed that the hottest decade over the last century is (envelope please) the 1930s.
  

  Instead of temperatures reaching their highest level in the past decade, ... the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the 10 warmest years since 1880, it turns out that four were in the 1930s and only three in the past decade.The significance of this is that James Hansen, the head of [NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies], has been Al Gore's closest scientific ally for nearly 20 years in promoting the global warming scare. The revised figures relate only to temperatures in North America but the fact that the pre-eminent scientific champion of the orthodoxy has been promoting erroneous data has considerable implications...

  Sure does. Looks like all that CO2 produced since the war has made the world ... nearly as hot now as it was before all that carbon was pumped out. Can someone please point me to the catastrophe?
  

The other three pieces of bad news that Brooker highlights are all related to measures insisted upon by governments (at huge expense) to counter the catastrophe that isn't.

• A study reported in Science finds that "the increasing production of biofuels to combat climate change will release between two and nine times more CO2 into the atmosphere in the next 30 years than generating the same energy from fossil fuels." Oops!
  
• John Boy Key wants NZ to cut carbon emissions by fifty percent by 2050. Good luck: a leaked memorandum has confirmed "that the UK will not be able to comply with a European Council decision last March that the EU must derive 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020." The target, say officials charged to make it happen "is not remotely achievable," and the attempt to do so "could cost UK electricity users alone an additional £22 billion a year, nearly £1,000 a year for every household. This is 2 per cent of GDP, and double Sir Nicholas Stern's estimate for the entire cost of halting global warming." Oops again!
• And it just keeps getting worse for warmists. Notes Brooker again:

  A final awkward finding comes from the world's leading expert on the financial costs of tackling global warming. Prof William Nordhaus, of Yale, has just published calculations showing that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the scale proposed by Gore might possibly save $12 trillion (£12,000bn) - but that their cost would be nearly three times as much, $34 trillion, more than half the world's GDP. Even for those who still believe the likes of Gore and Hansen, it hardly sounds like the bargain of the century.

Proof not just that hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't necessarily buy good science, but as Libertarianz leader Bernard Darnton says, "if socialist central planning doesn't work at seventeen degrees, then why would it work at nineteen?" Turns out it doesn't.

Read: Christopher Broooker's Notebook - Daily Telegraph (UK). [Hat tip, Marcus]

UPDATE: Dr Vincent Gray's recent paper 'Faking the Figures' throws much-needed light on Hansen's recent embarrassment, and on where and how that "global average temperature" figure is produced from a record in no such thing as a global average actually exists. Great background.