Just in time for the Detroit Auto Show, America’s news media is hysterically trumpeting “the hottest year ever” in the United States to advance a leftist agenda forcing ever more costly emissions regulations on vehicles – and the larger economy.<\/p>\n
“The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States,” begins the relentlessly alarmist A1 New York Times story of January 9.<\/p>\n
Whatever happened to\u00a0global<\/i>\u00a0warming?<\/p>\n
Just across the pond, England recorded the second coldest year since 1996 (behind the record-low temperatures of 2010) – including the\u00a0unusually cold and wet weather of the 2012 London Olympics.<\/a>\u00a0Global freezing, anyone?<\/p>\n As the England weather indicates, the Times is cherry-picking weather facts to advance its climate agenda. In fact, as the Times less sensationalistic cousin, the London Telegraph\u00a0reports<\/a>, GLOBAL temperatures have stopped rising in defiance of the Left’s fevered predictions.<\/p>\n “A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth,” reports the paper. “This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record ” suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period.”<\/p>\n Oh.<\/p>\n Climate is a lot more complicated than hyperventilating reporters would have you believe. Yes, the world is getting hotter – as it emerges from the Little Ice Age of the mid-19th century. The Times wants you to believe that this is caused by SUVs. But separating natural climate variability from man-made contributions is very difficult indeed – with the 2oth century full of weather swings like the U.S. felt in 2012.<\/p>\n