Stan,
I thought Canada (in particular) had had superb snowfalls this year, some really shockingly cold weather, etc.?
Now, I know that 1 year is just "weather", wheras mumblety years is "climate" (I believe 30 years is the standard claim), but perhaps you can confirm?
Anyway.... FWIW I'm not prepared to take the likes of Hansen, Schmidt, etc. at face value. They (particularly Hansen) have too much sewn up in the whole Impending Anthropogenic Global Warming Disaster to be independent. And, just like the Warmists will point at any "climate denier" and shout "big oil!"; so we can point back at the Hansen's of this world and shout "big government!". Remember, it's in the Government's interest (be it the US, Canada, UK or EU governments) that Global Warming is (a) man's fault, and (b) can be cured by extra taxation.
The big problem I have with GW (AGW in particular) is - it's all built on computer models. And, as anyone who's ever done any computer modelling will know; a computer model will tell you
exactly what you want to hear. Remember, you're in control of both the inputs and the processes. If you assume the inputs are fixed (and this is by no means a given, in the climate modelling world) real readings; you can simply fiddle with the processes until the model fits reality. Then you make your catastrophe predicitons. And, because (in general) the models are "closed source" - not available for public scrutiny, or even peer review - they could be doing anything! Things have improved (thanks to another Canadian - Steve McIntyre over at
http://www.climateaudit.org) in fits and starts, but the climate science community is beset with little cliques, bad-mouthing and other unsavoury and unscientific practices.
Then, of course, the model readings don't match up with the predictions! So, they get tweaked, and the "historical accuracy" gets better & better.... but the present day reality continues to turn it's nose up at the modellers.
AS for the readings, well, don't get me started. There's been a huge loss of land weather stations in recent (20-ish) years, to the point now where there's maybe 1/3rd of the peak number of stations. It's not the graph I was looking for, but this illustrates it quite well:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/nvst.htmlAnyhoo - the point of this ramble is this: There is far more to this "climate change" malarkey than meets the eye. And there's certainly a hell of a lot more to it than a gradual rise in CO
2 concentrations. It's currently impossible to figure the effects mankind has had on the climate, so it's pretty well impossible to decide that man-made CO
2 is the issue, cut that off & everything will be hunky-dory. This is not a repeat of the "ozone hole", which turned out to have a simple cause (CFCs in aerosol cans, airconditioners, etc.) and thus a simple solution (worldwide ban on CFCs).