Most Amusing

I do like predictons like this:

Here is the climate forecast for the next decade; although global warming will be held in check for a few years, it will come roaring back to send the mercury rising before 2014.

So any observed slow down, or even reversal, is now further evidence of climate change. See! See! it's already in our model! Those glaciers you see coming down the Yorkshire Moors are evidence of gorbal worming!

They might even be correct as well.

The new model developed at the Met's Hadley Centre in Exeter, and described in the journal Science, predicts that warming will slow during the next few years but then speed up again, and that at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year on record.

Hmmm. Now, I'm very much a sceptic on the subject of what we do about climate change, not much of one on its existence (and again, very much one on the likely severity)  but I thought this was interesting:

Well, it turns out, according to the NASA GISS database, that 1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century.  This is because many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards.  Here is how that happened (if you want to skip the story, make sure to look at the numbers at the bottom).

Nope, I've no idea whether or why there were those changes: perhaps some reader more up to date with climate models and the like could enlighten me? But if it is indeed true that 1934 was the warmest year of last century (with four of the ten warmest being in that decade, another one in the 20s, one in the 50s), don't we at least have to change the rhetoric a touch?