Good article Gary. At least occassionally the press looks a little deeper than denialist's isolated-areas-speak-for-the-whole-earth propaganda.
Has anyone on BL plotted daily data at ? It gives a daily look at GLOBAL temperatures . It is best if you play with teh data yourself and this site enables that - it is not conducive to capturing plots else I'd make more attempts to plot them here.
Recently the air temps are rising relatively quickly GLOBALLY speaking according to the UAH data. That is because we are in El Nino conditions since last June taking up more of the ocean heat content than normal. Surface air temperatures (sea surface and near surface (channel04 of the AMSU)) data trends are the most important sets in this data wrt extreme weather event frequency, agriculture, and water resources. Here is that data plotted since 1979 to 2009 in red.
Note that the Mar 14, 2010 data point is 1.09F = .61C higher than the Mar 14 2009 data. That's a lot higher.
Two other independent sources are plotted with it including another satellite based sensor (RSS) and direct surface measurements (using the CRU data). Since they track each other quite well, one would have to say Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Phil Jones are in cahoots. if your claim is that Dr. Jones's data (CRU) is manipulated (or fabricated as David has said). Truth is the nits (if there are any genuine nits at all) picked at the CRU data are minor in terms of results.
The GISS surface air temp data was corrected once for a Y2K "error" that Steve McIntyre caught. Here is what difference it made.
Figure 1: Global temperature anomaly before (red squares) and after (black diamonds) NASA's "Y2K" corrections
But it's the ocean heat content and sea level that are the most important metric wrt catastrophic gobal warming effects. And that has continued to rise unabated.
3 mm/year does not sound like much, but that is 0.3m/century and that is with no more feedback.
Now I have said most of this before. This time will David seriously deal with to the DATA I bring other than to pretend it is all "fabricated" or claim Morner is the world's expert in sea level rise (what a joke his "scieintific" articles are - among the worst , no the worst, I have ever seen)? I doubt it.
Here is another site I just discovered last night - . It does a good job of dismantling the denialists' claims. For quick "no data" answers, read the ARGUMENT menu. For an introduction to GW click on "Global Warming is Still Happening" or "We are Causing Global Warming". For more meaty/technical answers, read the articles on the left and their referenced papers.
Informed by Data.
Driven by the SPIRIT and JESUS’s Example.
Promoting the Kingdom of GOD on Earth.