Dan Satterfield, a broadcast meteorologist in the USA, has written an article for the NCAR website, linking weather extremes to global warming.
The past twelve months have seen some of the most extreme weather of modern times, especially in North America. NOAA announced in January that in 2011 the United States suffered through a total of 14 weather disasters that cost over a billion dollars each. Among these were the Texas drought that was literally off the charts, and of course the deadly tornadoes in Alabama and Joplin, Missouri, among other places. More of the United States was either extremely wet or extremely dry in 2011 than in any other year on record.
There we go again, measuring weather disasters in dollars so that inflation measure global warming. However, the point I want to make today is a different one. Look at the end of that paragraph. Wet or dry both being evidence of global warming? Does that sound familiar?
Of course it does. When Soon and Baliunas published their 2003 take on the Medieval Warm Period, they took dry or wet as evidence of medieval warmth. It's fair to say that this treatment did not go down well with the scientific community, and in fact several members of the board of the journal concerned resigned in protest.
I wonder how many members of the NCAR board are going to resign over Dan Satterfield's article?