Richard Farmer enters the climate change cage match

With fear and trepidation. I am loathe to provoke Tamas Calderwood into another outburst of correspondence but I cannot resist showing this graph from the NASA dataset:

Last month, you will notice, tied with May 1998 as the hottest May on record. That followed April 2010 being the hottest ever April recorded and the period January to May this year was the warmest in 131 years. Yet in Crikey yesterday Tamas Calderwood asked “If man-made CO2 is dangerously warming the planet, why wasn’t the current El Nino warmer than 1998’s?” Well, there’s your answer. It has been.

And to proffer further ammunition for the next attempt to defend the indefensible I look forward to an explanation as to the lack of significance of these two climate happenings.

The Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University reports a record low snow cover in the entire northern hemisphere for the month of May.

And to r0und out today’s selection there’s that graph of Arctic sea ice extent showing (the red line) that it keeps reaching new lows.

Following an Australian path. As I read how the British Liberal Democrats are relishing their role as part of a let’s-show-them-we’re-tough government I cannot help but recollect what happened when their Australian third party counterpart decided to show that it could be economically responsible. From the moment the Australian Democrats sided with the conservatives to introduce a goods and services tax they went into a terminal decline.

The reason was not that their support was irresponsible but that it ignored the fact that their electoral support came much further from the left than the party proposing the change. I will not be at all surprised if the Liberal Democrats in the UK suffer the same fate for the same reason.

A funny kind of split. It is hard to see what the so-called Cabinet split that The Australian is writing about is actually meant to be. Simon Crean dares to makes the sensible observation that a bit more discussions with the mining industry before the announcement of the new super profits tax might have been a good idea and that is supposed to be a Cabinet divided? Give us  break. That kind of egg-beater approach is what makes politicians so loathe to ever say what they think, no matter how obvious the comment might be.