BRRRR! The World Has Never Seen Such Freezing Heat!

[Photo: Telegraph.co.uk London October Snowfall]

Here in Southern California, we are in the middle of a sweltering November, accompanied by a continuing drought and a prolonged, disastrous wildfire season. That, plus the politicial proclivities of most Southern Californians, meant that few of us were surprised when, last Monday, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record. The rest of the world, however, found the GISS announcement rather startling. As Christoper Booker writes in the Telegraph:

Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explains the GISS announcement. It was a case of "garbage in, garbage out." Seems that the figures for a large part of Russia, which showed temperatures 10 degrees above normal, reflected the fact that no new data had been entered for October. Rather, data from September had been simply carried over and entered for two months running. No one at GISS noticed. Read the whole story here. [Hat tip: Dennis Prager.]