But that sure doesn’t have anything to do with “global cooling.” In fact, according to the British Met Office, 2010 may well be the warmest year on record. (2009 was the fifth warmest.) Further, as the Met Office, among others, have pointed out, it’s not cold everywhere in the world. Joe Romm had this item the other day in which he noted that “…some places are coolish, some are quite warm. On the whole, the planet is not in a deep freeze. Quite the reverse, not only do we continue to warm, but the warming in the equatorial Pacific means we are in a moderate-to strong El Niño.”
Why is it cold in some places? For one thing, it’s winter. Beyond that, as this AP story from last week notes, Arctic air has been swooping down from the north. In Britain, they’ve been seeing very cold weather – but certainly not record cold. They’ve even had snow. The Met Office had this look into the cold snap. See also this excellent synopsis of the state of affairs from the FT which clues us to the fact of “an alternative weather story.” Parts of the Canadian Arctic, the Middle East and North Africa, and Australia have been experiencing temperatures as much as 10° C above average.
Conclusion: “The world’s weather is in an unusual but not unprecedented state of imbalance, which climatologists say is an abrupt natural fluctuation superimposed on the very gradual process of global warming.”
