First Snow and Climate Change

Yesterday our first significant snow flurries arrived! We had almost an inch on our patio table when I came home.

When I was a teenager in the '90s, most religious folks (as well as many in the Church of God, including myself) seemed to be riding an anti-anti-global warming bandwagon. I wish I could remember why. I have my own theories.

I've since taken a much more moderate view. I don't believe God would have given us instructions for caring for the earth if we couldn't make any impact on it. Nevertheless, an article like this gives me some pause.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

So according to NASA, August was the hottest October on record. At least we can all agree that this crisis is man-made!