Michael Fumento

"The decade of 2000 to 2009 appears to be the warmest one in the modern record, the World Meteorological Organization reported in a new analysis on Tuesday," according to the New York Times. "The announcement is likely to be viewed as a rejoinder to a renewed challenge from skeptics to the scientific evidence for global warming, as international negotiators here [in Copenhagen] seek to devise a global response to climate change."

Yes, and a false and misleading rejoinder at that. The statement appears here in what's obviously a propaganda sheet. At a glance it would seem to refute my recent assertion in Forbes that there's been no warming over the past decade.

But it's a matter of which interpretation do you think counts. Yes, the last decade was warmer than the previous decade. But there has been no warming within that decade. My point remains intact: During the last decade GHG emissions and ambient levels have gone up every year whereas warming has not as this chart shows. That's the only point I was trying to make, that even as every year the world poured more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the ambient concentrations of those gases rose, there was no rise in warming. The formula of "more GHGs = more warming" is overly simplistic; something is going on in nature that's seriously impacting temperatures.

Oh, and as far as that "modern record" stuff goes, that's sneaky stuff too. As I pointed out, and as this graph shows, it was much warmer in the medieval warming period - you know, back when those Viking ships were pumping CO2 in the atmosphere and when the Carolingian empire got most of its power from coal-fired power plants.

So, yeah, the WMO is kinda basically lying.