That quote was not from the MET office, or any staffer. It was a troll post on a forum that has become viral.

Right, Adrien. Ri-i-i-g-hht.

Curse them for publishing scientists who contradicted the orthodoxy. Do you not see how your blinkered position undermines your credibility?

Let me summarise your position: “curse them for proving me wrong, their evidence only hardens my resolve in my religious beliefs.”

You people really are embarrasing.

“Apart from “Climategate,” surely everyone would have to acknowledge that a survey done in England while still in the coldest winter for decades is going to sway some to warming skepticism.’

It wasn’t that. It was that according to the UK Meteorology Office, this winter is the warmest in living memory. Really.

“From a Met Office staffer’s internet posting to a newspaper (in early January):

“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

At some point in time, people are going to compare what such people are saying, look outside the window, and say “hang on…”.

While one can quite reasonably say that minor variations in weekly weather – or even major ones – aren’t symptomatic of anything apart from short-term variability, a claim that this is not just a warm winter, but the warmest in living memory indicates that some have lost their grip on reality. Not just by substituting the pseudoscience of political climatology vs the ill-understood science of actual climatology, but thinking that everyone would ignore unsubtle and blatantly obvious evidence that they’re off with the faeries.

I found that D&A were right but it took the wind out of my sails when someone pointed out that similar information was published 13 years ago by Peterson & Vose (1997).

Thank goodness the Mormon church does not run their on-line IGI database the way NASA and NOAA run theirs!

Any one of us and our kids can make very intelligent contributions to this debate with just Year 10 Science and Geography.

1. We have all learnt about the water cycle (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, etc).

2. We have all learnt about basic animal phsyiology and photosynthesis.

3. We all have a basic knowledge of the periodic table, and where abouts on it elements like carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen sit. We all know about atomic numbers and atomic masses. So we know how oxygen binds with carbon, hydrogen, etc.

4. We have a basic idea of the carbon/hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen cycles.

5. We either already know, or could find out in a jiffy, that the major greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone. It might surprise a lot of us to be told that the largest concentration by far is water vapor at 60% or so.

5. Now, when the issue turns to how these gases affect temperature, things suddenly get very complicated as we enter the realm of radiative forcings – the heat energy beamed back down to the atmosphere by the greenhouse gases themselves – and the big scary Darth Vadar of them all external forcings which covers all the astronomy on changes in earth’s three orbital cycles. HSC Physics should do the trick.

So all in all, the quality of debate among the Australian laity should be 1,000 times higher. It’s not rocket science.

There has to be a big question about what the political response to this is going to be. Will the Tories change tack on the issue?

Der Speigel has also been writing about this and having interviews with people like Von Storch and Pielke Jnr. It would be interesting to see if German public opinion is changing.

Other sizeable states in the EU, includng Poland and Italy, have not been keen on C02 emission’s reduction schemes. They will comply if offered sufficient compensation but even this may crack if public opinion in those countries shifts and the international setup changes.

In the US things have also changed. No treaty that requires 67 votes is going to pass. The Democrats have to be worried about a backlash in November. It’s hard to imagine them doing much.

India has withdrawn their support from the IPCC process and wants to set up their own scientific board. If China were to join them the whole UN framework would pretty much be dead.

Which leads on to what is Australia going to do. Will The ALP, which is probably going to win the next election, keep with their current program in response to the changes internationally or are they going to change tack?

As entropy noted, the reason for the ‘dead cat bounce’ in January is El Nino since most of the anomalously warm temps are being recorded over the oceans (particularly over the Eastern and Southern Pacific) rather than over land. When you combine this with the declining trend in ocean heat content, I’m guessing that this anomalously warm reading in January and maybe Feb portends colder temps for the rest of the year.