The Met Office does it again

A Telegraph article illustrated by the notoriously faked photograph of polar bears on a melting iceberg reports that UK Met Office has trumpeted the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report for 2009 that proves that global temperatures have risen over the past 50 years - by a whole degree Fahrenheit!

Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said variability in different regions, such as the cold winter in Britain, does not mean the rest of the world is not warming. Fair enough. But then he adds "greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation".

No half-way well informed sceptic denies that the world is warming, as it has been since the last of the Little Ice Age minima in 1850. Likewise nobody who purports to be a scientist should describe one of a large numbers of variables as the sole, let alone "glaringly obvious" explanation, furthermore on the basis of a fifty year sample that covers only the period that climate catastrophists wish to highlight.