The warmists’ last sad hurrah for the ‘hottest year ever’

Inevitably, as 2016 neared its end, the usual suspects, such as the BBC, were all piling in to remind us that it was “the hottest year on record”, with particular focus on the recent “super-heatwave” producing temperatures of 20 degrees or more above average in the Arctic. But as usual, it has been important to know just what all this fevered hype was leaving out.

The reason I so often quote the blog run by Paul Homewood, Not a lot of people know that, is that, uniquely on this side of the Atlantic and drawing on a huge range of scientific and historical data, he so expertly explains what we are not being told by the prevailing fog of propagandist groupthink emanating from governments and the media on all matters relating to climate and energy.

Who might have guessed, for instance, how the closing weeks of “the hottest year evah” have seen unusual cold and snowfall across a vast swathe of the northern hemisphere: snow in the Sahara desert, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Peloponnese, Korea, China. Blizzards across the northern United States, from Montana to New England. Even in Siberia, no stranger to extreme cold, locals have been stunned by temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees. A graph based on official data shows that snow extent in the northern hemisphere last autumn was the second greatest on record since 1967, and that five of the snowiest have come since 2010.

As for that “Arctic heatwave”, in a post headed “Going to the Arctic? Don’t bother packing that bikini”, Homewood shows a chart giving detailed temperature readings on Christmas Day for that entire region. Although temperatures were much higher than usual in a small sliver around the North Pole, thanks to warm air blowing in from the south, for much of the Arctic temperatures of minus 30 and 40 degrees were as usual for this time of year.

Homewood shows that similar warm spikes have regularly occurred before, not just in recent years but way back through the 20th century. According to the satellite records shown on Crysophere Today, last summer’s annual ice-melt was in fact less than that in seven of the previous nine years.

Of course, even the most lightheaded warmists concede that a significant factor in the recent global temperature rise was a record El Niño, that cyclical Pacific current which in its warm phase raises temperatures all over the world. But these have already plummeted from their 2016 peak by 0.5 degrees, even before the current has fully reversed itself into a cooling La Niña. By this time next year, we can expect all those excitable propagandists to have gone very much quieter.