Phew! What a Scorcher!

The obituaries for Global Warming appear to be written, even the Guardian is wringing its hands and wondering what to do next.

However nobody appears to have told the planet that. It's hard to credit, but satellites recorded the last month as the hottest January since records began in 1979.

It seems the demise of the Anthropogenic Climate Change has been greatly exaggerated.

How does this fit in with the country under a blanket of snow and grinding to a halt for want of grit? Well that was weather, Siberia's weather to be precise, blown in on a northeast wind. We had minus 15 degrees one morning here in Glossop. Possibly if it hadn't been for Global Warming it would have been minus 16, but it doesn't really make much difference.

Meanwhile Australia was boiling and the rest of the world wasn't doing too badly. Even in England the cold snap was only part of the month. Our snowdrops appeared before the snow had melted, and we're at 160 metres above sea level.

The propaganda war may be being lost, the IPCC may be under fire, but the fundamentals of AGW theory are sound. China may not know where its weather stations are, some grey data may have crept into the reports courtesy of social scientists and biologists (not real scientists!) but the basics of AGW are really pretty basic. At the end of the day the atmosphere is just atoms bumping together, and we're fairly sure we know how that works.

I suppose you could argue that media studies is just atoms bumping together too, but climatology is a little closer to fundamental physics than that. A CO2 molecule only has three atoms in it, whilst with Posh Spice you must be well into double figures. At least.