Global warming jumps the shark

It took a century for earth's recorded average temperature to rise by 0.6 degrees Celsius, and then one year - last year -- for it to drop by between 0.6 and 0.75 degrees Celsius, depending on which of the four major global tracking agencies you follow  (that's Britain's Hadley Centre's graph for the last twenty years at right).

Just to repeat: that's more than the rise in recorded surface temperatures over the whole of the twentieth century, and more than four times greater than the supposed effect on temperatures of every every nation on the planet reducing its emissions according to the Kyoto Protocol.

It's a one-off, but it's a big drop.

Notes Michael Asher at Daily Tech, "For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down," and it's the reason residents of places like Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Jerusalem and Baghdad have been making snowballs for the first time in living memory -- or, in the case of Baghdad, ever -- that China and North America have been riding out their worst winters in decades, and that more snow and ice cover the northern hemisphere than at any time since 1966.

"The planet has a fever," Al Bore told Congress last year. "The baby's crib is on fire!" Guess not.

Now, one cold winter does not a non-warmist make, but as Colorado's Daily Sentinel summarises, the bitter cold is messing up a perfectly good panic.  No wonder one Canadian journalist suggests "brother Al" stop denying the evidence, and try for "a second Oscar with a sequel to his movie An Inconvenient Truth.  Perhaps he could call it The Cold, Hard Truth."

I look forward to the human drama of seeing The Goracle morph from warmist to freezist.

UPDATE 1: The perfect time for for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, co-sponsored by Australia's Carbon Sense Coalition and the US's Heartland Institute.  According to chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr. Viv Forbes, "the conference will highlight the fact that a large number of eminently qualified scientists all over the world are rejecting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC: 41.23, -0.13, -0.31%) proposition that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused or will cause dangerous global warming." According to Forbes, "Global warming hysteria will take a cold shower in New York next week."

UPDATE 2: So why has this been so little reported in the mainstream chatterati?  British writer Melanie Phillips at The Spectator suggests bias.  Bias.  From the media!  Who would have thunk it?

Every politician and B-list celebrity now anxiously measures his or her carbon footprint. Every British schoolchild is now drilled to believe that man-made global warming is a Fact along with poverty and the existence of Belgium. It’s a wonder any of us has any incentive to get up in the morning.

So you might think that the news that the world isn’t frying after all would be all over the media. World saved! That’s a helluva story, surely...

Apart from a couple of lonely newspaper pieces [however], virtually none of this dramatic news has been reported. The world has no idea that it is no longer doomed to fry but maybe should invest instead in some thermals and start emitting more heat. The Chief Scientist has not said anything about it. The Royal Society has not said anything about it. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and Sir John Houghton and Sir Jonathan Porritt and the Today programme have not been heard to say anything about it.

And neither have any of the usual suspects here or in the US have had much to say either.  Why?  David Aaronovitch gives a name to the symptom: Intelligentsia Default Position, or IDP. [Hat tip Global Warming Politics]