A complete list of things caused by global warming;

Agricultural land increase, Africa devastated, African aid threatened, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, anxiety, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic lakes disappear, asthma, atmospheric defiance, atmospheric circulation modified, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased, bananas destroyed, bananas grow, bet for $10,000, better beer…

DavidSuzuki.org;

“The debate is over about whether or not climate change is real.”

You know, you’d think a geneticist would know better.

A massive international study of the human genome has caused scientists to rethink some of the most basic concepts of cellular function. Genes, it turns out, may be relatively minor players in genetic processes that are far more subtle and complicated than previously imagined.
Among the critical findings: A huge amount of DNA long regarded as useless — and dismissively labeled “junk DNA” — now appears to be essential to the regulatory processes that control cells. Also, the regions of DNA lying between genes may be powerful triggers for diseases — and may hold the key for potential cures.
[…]
[Thomas D. Tullius , professor of chemistry at Boston University] – “There were huge surprises; this research has upset a lot of thinking about how the genome works.”
He added in an interview: “There now appear to be thousands of places in the genome that were long thought to be useless or meaningless, but which we now see to have a functional role. But we don’t really understand what that role is.”
Most startling, according to researchers, is that some areas of the genome looming as crucial are regions that don’t contain specific instructions for making proteins. That recognition amounts to a sea change in basic biology.

Via Maxed Out Mama who notes that this isn’t really news. Evidence that so-called “junk” dna wasn’t junk at all has been mounting for some time.

Among other items, it calls into question very basic tenets of evolutionary gene studies based on gene “clocks” and it calls into severe question the statement that we share almost all of our DNA with our closest primate relatives. It’s so radical that it’s hard to construct a parallel. Something on the order of geologists holding a press conference and announcing that the world is flat after all.

It isn’t just new findings about “junk” dna that’s undermining the fashionable field of evolutionary genetics. In 2004* I pointed to this two year old item on new discoveries in mitochondrial dna, the very underpinning of these genetic “clocks” that purport to tell us, among other things, when it was that domestic dogs diverged from their wolf ancestors, and that all current humans have a single common female ancestor, a “mitochondrial Eve”.

For decades biologists have assumed that mitochondria – the cells’ power stations – are inherited solely through the maternal line.
Mitochondria in the sperm from the father were presumed to be destroyed immediately after conception, leaving behind only those from the mother. But Marianne Schwartz and John Vissing from the University Hospital Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, have discovered that one of their patients inherited the majority of his mitochondria from his father.
[…]
The researchers think inheritance of paternal mitochondrial DNA is probably very rare. But the findings will have implications for a number of branches of biology. Evolutionary biologists often date the divergence of species by the differences in genetic sequences in mitochondrial DNA. Even if paternal DNA is inherited very rarely, it could invalidate many of their findings. It will also have implications for scientists investigating inherited metabolic diseases.

Yet despite its obvious significance, this is information that aparently still manages to elude a good many in the field.
Now, why might that be?
(emphasis mine)

One of these is not like the other.

The Briffa data deletions;

“If a practising scientist selected a 1987 data set over more recent versions, failed to cite it correctly, altered the appearance of the data without a clear explanation and didn’t include the data from the last 20 years then I think we’d all be asking serious questions about their professionalism.”

Read the whole thing – or as much as you still can. Note at the end that the IPCC forced the deletion of the embarrassing content.
More detailed discussion of Briffa.

A global warming believer denies Al Gore;

Dr. Mote is the co-author of an article in the July/August issue of American Scientist magazine that debunks claims by Mr. Gore and others that Kilimanjaro’s famous glaciers are melting away because of problems humans have created.
The ice cover has shrunk by 90 per cent over the past century, the article states, but not because of global warming.
Drawing on the research of other scientists who have studied Kilimanjaro over the past several decades, the article points out that the mountain’s glaciers have been in decline for well over a century.
Most of that predates the era in which humans began pumping harmful amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
[…]
“Kilimanjaro,” the authors write, “… has gained and lost ice through processes that bear only indirect connections, if any, to recent trends in global climate.”
Dr. Mote believes Mr. Gore should stop using the before-and-after pictures of Kilimanjaro’s ice cap that provides a defining moment of his global warming slide show. Dr. Mote had, in fact, intended to tell Mr. Gore this himself when the former U.S. vice-president was in Seattle last year to give his slide-show presentation.
But he lost his nerve.

“I think the evidence is quite clear that carbon offsets cause whirlwinds.”

Via Climate Audit.

John Brignell;

Huxley was one of a long tradition of British sceptical philosophers. From the Bacons, through the likes of Locke, Hume and Russell, to the magnificent climax of Popper’s statement of the principle of falsifiability, the scientific method was painfully established, only to be abandoned in a few short decades. It is one of the great ironies of modern history that the nation that was the cradle of the scientific method came to lead the process of its abandonment. The great difference, then, is that religion demands belief, while science requires disbelief. There is a great variety of faiths. Atheism is just as much a faith as theism. There is no evidence either way. There is no fundamental clash between faith and science – they do not intersect. The difficulties arise, however, when one pretends to be the other.
The Royal Society, as a major part of the flowering of the tradition, was founded on the basis of scepticism. Its motto “On the word of no one” was a stout affirmation. Now suddenly, following their successful coup, the Greens have changed this motto of centuries to one that manages to be both banal and sinister – “Respect the facts.” When people start talking about “the facts” it is time to start looking for the fictions. Real science does not talk about facts; it talks about observations, which might turn out to be inaccurate or even irrelevant.
The global warmers like to use the name of science, but they do not like its methods. They promote slogans such a “The science is settled” when real scientists know that science is never settled. They were not, however, always so wise. In 1900, for example, the great Lord Kelvin famously stated, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Within a few years classical physics was shattered by Einstein and his contemporaries. Since then, in science, the debate is never closed.
The world might (or might not) have warmed by a fraction of a degree. This might (or might not) be all (or in part) due to the activities of mankind. It all depends on the quality of observations and the validity of various hypotheses. Science is at ease with this situation. It accepts various theories, such as gravitation or evolution, as the least bad available and of the most practical use, but it does not believe. Religion is different.

White House Fact Sheet: A New International Climate Change Framework

Today, President Bush Announced U.S. Support For An Effort To Develop A New Post-2012 Framework On Climate Change By The End Of 2008. The plan recognizes that it is essential that a new framework include both major developed and developing economies that generate the majority of greenhouse gas emissions and consume the most energy, and that climate change must be addressed in a way that enhances energy security and promotes economic growth.
Under The President’s Proposal, The United States Will Convene The Major Emitters And Energy Consumers To Advance And Complete The New Framework By The End Of 2008.

Europe is “furious”.
Greenpeace is squawking.
Via Planet Gore, where they believe we’ve witnessed a Bush coup in wrestling the agenda on climate change out of the hands of the UN and Europe. Exerpts follow.
Steve Hayward;

“It seems to me that lots of people are missing a notable feature of Bush’s proposal to convene a “Big 15” to contemplate long-range greenhouse gas emissions targets: Bush is in effect threatening to put the UN’s IPCC out of business as the main diplomatic forum for global climate policy. Whatever else may be said—both good and bad—about Bush’s initiative, putting the UN out of the climate business can’t entirely be a bad thing.”

Iain Murray

You’re right, of course. This was the logical end-point of the IPCC process. Once the science had become accepted to the point where everyone agreed that some political action needed to be taken, the IPCC would no longer be needed. If the science is as “settled” as it is claimed, then there’s no need for an intergovernmental panel on the issue any more. It becomes an economic and political question – and governments that aren’t experts on climatology are pretty good at economic analysis and political bargaining.

Chris Horner:

President Bush stunned the Europeans with his Thursday announcement, playing their game as well as they do but from a better position: US carbon dioxide emissions from 2000-2006 are flat. Europe’s are up and steadily rising, 6 years out of the 9* since Kyoto was agreed, in fact; US CO2 emissions over that same period are equally superior.
The truth which the Administration refuses to say (more than once) is that big-talking Europe is a bossy non-performer. Bush diplomatically doesn’t say so, but instead preempted a planned political trap at the G-8 talks by clearly delineating the US position, incompatible with and pulling the rug out from under G-8 president Germany’s plan. German and G-8 president Angela Merkel planned to draw the US to an event to have pies thrown at them, then strong-arm them into agreeing to something the US otherwise rejected. That is, to replicate what happened at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
[…]
Better, Bush reiterated his “do your own thing” policy that China and other significant players have made unavoidably clear is a non-negotiable condition precedent. Immediately garnering the support of world leaders such as Japan’s Abe and the departing-but-Kyotophilic Tony Blair is priceless.
In short, with an offering far more credible on the global stage than Kyoto, Bush changed the news story and split European and relevant global opinion […]
He also did this without changing policy. Who knows, maybe the White House now “gets it” so much that, if our EU friends keep pushing it, we will hear about actual emissions performance since Kyoto was agreed.

Let’s hope so.

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post;

More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.
My series set out to profile the dissenters — those who deny that the science is settled on climate change — and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world’s premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop — the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Of course, none of this is news unless you limit your media consumption to the rock hard stupid coverage provided by CTV[1][2] which – as much as it pains me to say this – is inferior to even the propoganda laden fare provided by the CBC.
Footnotes:
[1] CTV National News – “Canada’s #1 source for Florida weather.”

[2] David Akin – “Climate reporting for the under 7 set”. Please, Mr. Akin – science is not your forte. Statements like “even if we reduced C02 levels to zero, temperatures would continue to rise for the next 100 years” (from an on-air report last month) are an insult to the intelligence of viewers – and raise serious questions about your own.

Looking up at the swarm buzzing my ornamental crab last week, I considered going back to the house to get my camera.
“Hey, guys – I think I found those bees you were looking for.”

There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world, and many thousands more types of pollinating insects. What you’re hearing about, “colony collapse disorder,” affects one species of bee – the European honey bee. […] The “significant percentage” of failing hives is still a drop in the bucket when viewed against the global population of honey bees, and there are lots of beekeepers (even in the U.S., which appears hardest hit) who have not had, and may never have, significant losses of colonies. Plenty of honey bees remain to replace the ones that have died. It’s not yet time to scream that the sky is falling.

And, oh boy – where have we heard this before?

Sixth, it’s never a good idea to trust what the media are telling you. At least once in the present case the media got something completely wrong and created a huge mess: The story about cell phones was basically a misrepresentation of what one pair of reporters wrote about a study that they misinterpreted. In a nutshell, the original research didn’t involve cell phones, and the researchers never said their research was related to honey bee colony die-offs. Even details like the alleged Einstein quote are dubious. No one has yet found proof that Einstein said anything about bees dying off – the earliest documented appearance of the “quote” is 1994 and, yes, Albert was dead at the time.

As I’ve said in the past – if you believe everything you read in the newspaper, try getting interviewed sometime.
h/t

Data collection – IPCC style!

I decided I’d drop some more fun with entropy your way. Here is the USHCN station of climate record in Redding, CA GISS number # 425725920010 and used in the climate modeling database. […]
Like Marysville, the site is surrounded by asphalt, and the surface is unnatural – its wood chips over weedmat, and I’ll have to say it was hot as heck to walk on during mid-day..
But the kicker is the “accessories” they’ve added for convenience of running the hygrometer and for night observations. Yes it is another fine high-quality USHCN climate recording site. I wonder how many times they forgot to turn off the light? It looks like there might be room for a hot plate to keep your coffee warm while making observations.

At Tahoe City California, GISS ID 425724880010…

Final picture. It seems the groundskeeper likes to burn the trash and paper he picks up on the grounds, guess where he does it?

www.mineyourownbusiness.org

Not that it’s hard, since the UN is producing propaganda, but this story’s interesting:

Last week, NewsBusters readers were introduced to Portland, Maine’s fabulous fifteen-year-old, Kristen Byrnes, whose website “Ponder the Maunder” marvelously takes on anthropogenic global warming myths including those being advanced by soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore.
As will be revealed post haste, this newest – and likely youngest – member of the growing list of folks skeptical about man’s role in climate change actually walks the walk better than she talks the talk.

Kevin Trenberth[1], who is listed as a contributing author of the 2007 IPCC climate summary, surprised me, given his belief in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), when he said “climate models are markedly deficient by not adequately representing tropical cyclones.” Sea surface temperatures get too warm in the models due to improper handling of “surface energy exchanges from hurricanes in the global energetics of the climate system”. I’ve posted about several of the problems with the models before but this was confirmation from a major researcher.
In a study on the number of tropical cyclones, Gregg Holland presented his conclusion that there has been a doubling of the number of tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin over the past 100 years and the increase had little to do with natural variability but was caused by a warming climate trend.
Chris Landsea was the very next speaker and said “No”, the increase is due entirely to our increased ability to detect storms that we wouldn’t have even known existed a few decades ago, which is what those of us who have been in this business for quite awhile have believed for some time.
Chris Landsea’s talk at the conference has now been published in EOS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

From Counting Atlantic Tropical Cyclones Back to 1900 (PDF):

[…] data from the first 66 years, shown in Figure 2b, have a quite different long-term character, with an average of 75% of tropical cyclones striking land. While there were no years with more than 80% striking land from 1966 onward, there were 15 years between 1900 and 1965 in which all (100%) recorded tropical cyclones struck land that season. This difference in the long-term percentage of tropical cyclones that struck land (75% from 1900–1965 versus 59% from 1966–2006) indicates a large bias toward underreporting of tropical cyclones that remained over the open Atlantic Ocean.

Thus concludes today’s scientific consensus moment.
Thankyou.
[1] This is the same Kevin Trenberth who was a guest last week on 650 CKOM citing hurricane Katrina as indicative of global warming.

(click for full size)
Comment 33;

Forgetting for a moment that none of those lines is what it purports to be … just take the whole mess at face value. What I see is this:
1) The caption is proven false by the graphic it allegedly describes. “… all suggest that it is warmer now than at any time in the last 1000 years”. No they dont all suggest that. Their ‘Esper 2002′ line suggests that it is no warmer now than at any time in the last 1000 years, and the ‘Juckes 2006′ graph says that it is cooler now than at least three past temp peaks. And many of the rest show current temps within ~0.1C of some pre-SUV peak … certainly within error.
2) Speaking of error, apart from the ‘Crowley 2000′ splice job, all ‘temperature reconstructions’ miss the ‘Direct measurements’ of the latest temperature by ~0.8C.
3) The error in 2) is pretty well matched by the typical discrepancy between the high and low estimates for any particular time in the last 1000 years, which seems to hover around 0.6C.
4) Uh, arent the errors in 2) and 3) approximately the same size as the alleged measured warming that is going to kill us all?
5) (-1.0C) – (-0.8C) = 0.4C
This is ‘The New Scientist’? Seems like ‘The Emperors New Tailor’ to me.

Comment 142;

I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that nothing is a valid proxy for temperature unless there is a rigorous derivation of a temperature metric from the observable. This is the case for oxygen isotope fractionation. It’s not the case for tree ring widths or densities. Divergence raises the issue that the correlations could well be empirical happenstance. What divergence “proves” is that maybe tree rings correlate with temperature, and maybe they don’t. It proves that tree rings, as such, are not worthy of blind trust or qualitative justificationisms.
Only a derivation from theory will establish the issue, one way or the other. Until then, it’s all just shouting.
Some time ago on CA I discussed with Paul Dennis a 13-C kinetics approach to derivation of a true temperature from tree wood. If that worked out, it would be a method of deriving a valid temperature metric from ring wood that is independent of ring width and ring density. It would suffer from its own suite of confounding variables, primarily to do with night-time respiration, but it would be a physically valid metric on the same order as 18-O fractionation in ice cores. But I’ll bet no one is working on any such thing. If Rob Wilson or anyone else really loved their field of dendroclimatology and wanted to bring quantitative rigor to it, they’d be working on a project like that. Derive a valid temperature from wood from quantitative physical theory. Not doing one more hand-wavingly justified, speciously normalized, pseudo-temperature publicizing, tree ring study. Those things are nothing more than mathematically embellished propaganda for dendroclimatology groups — look guys, at what we did this time! Isn’t it fun!
In other areas of science, people who publish conflicting results argue about them in terms of theory until a clear winner emerges. And the winning idea is ultimately the one grounded most firmly in objective theory. Those spaghetti graphs all claim — each and every one — to tell a single story. However, they clearly have different story-lines, and the set we see doesn’t exhaust all the possible, equivalently pseudo-justifiable, story-lines. They are conflicting results that should cause the groups of origin to argue vigorously about who is right or wrong in terms of applicable theory. But that doesn’t seem to happen, perhaps because there is no applicable theory. Instead we get uncritical composite plots like Rob Wilson’s, or like the lovely IPCC hash that John A reproduced in #65, and various new proxy studies that merely present some new compilation of trees and cores representing yet one more soon-to-be-bypassed statement about past pseudo-temperatures. It’s a scientific scandal.

Comment 156;

While I am happy to discuss this elsewhere, the reason that it is important to the current topic is that we have several “global mean temperature” dataesets, which show both different trends and different anomalies. Because “global mean temperature” has no agreed upon meaning, none of these datasets is theoretically superior to any other. This has a couple of effects.
1) People are free to choose which “global mean temperature” dataset they wish to use to compare and fit their proxy data … which in turn changes the result of the proxy exercise in whatever direction they may prefer.
2) It increases the uncertainty of both the data and the proxy reconstruction. For example, even using a single dataset, an average of all of the stations in the world shows a different trend than averaging the hemispheres individually and then averaging the two hemispheres. Which one is correct? We can’t say, there is no theoretical reason to prefer one over the other, but it certainly must increase the uncertainty of whichever one we may choose.
For example, were all of the various proxies in the graphic above done using the same “global mean temperature” dataset? I would doubt it, although I don’t know … but if they are not, it must perforce increase the uncertainty.

Thus concludes today’s scientific consensus moment.
Thankyou.
h/t

At least, according to CBC Fruit Fly Guy (May 2006) (PDF);

The European Union (EU) has a Kyoto target requiring the original 15 EU member nations to collectively reduce their emissions 8% below 1990 levels during the Kyoto period of 2008 to 2012. The EU negotiated a burden-sharing agreement to unevenly allocate emission reductions among its members. Currently, emissions are already below 1990 levels. Existing programs and policies combined with the purchase of international credits are expected to allow the EU to go beyond its target and reduce emissions by 9.3% by 2010.

Figure 1: Total EU-15 greenhouse gas emissions in relation to the Kyoto target (source: European Environment Agency, 2006)

Chris Horner; “If you see any emission reductions in there, there’s a job waiting for you in Brussels.”

I so want to know if this received government funding.
(h/t Cal2)

Since IPCC climate modellers possess the super-computing power to use data collected from both past and present to predict sea levels, weather patterns, planetary temperature, and polar bear populations 50 years into the future… what are they waiting for?
Surely they can set an afternoon aside to tell us who’s going to win the 2007 World Series.
That wasn’t meant as a joke.
Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming…

The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.
The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released U.S. Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.
In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007.

Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles

Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta

Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel’s top young award winning scientists

Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government

Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner

Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of The University of Auckland, N.Z.,

Meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin

Global warming author and economist Hans H.J. Labohm

Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa

Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw

Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa

Environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of Ottawa.

Lots more at the link. PDF version

Those deniers just won’t let it go…

The strong effect of cloud processes on model sensitivities to greenhouse gases was emphasized further through a now-classic set of General Circulation Model (GCM) experiments, carried out by Senior and Mitchell (1993). They produced global surface temperature changes (due to doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration) ranging from 1.9°C to 5.4°C, simply by altering the way that cloud radiative properties were treated in the model. It is somewhat unsettling that the results of a complex climate model can be so drastically altered by substituting one reasonable cloud parameterization for another, thereby approximately replicating the overall inter-model range of sensitivities.

IPCC AR4 overview of the history of climate change science, cloud modeling and climate sensitivity. (More commentary at the link).
(Related: For those who want to do their part)

[edited transcript]

RUSH: Dr. Spencer [ climatologist from the University of Alabama in Huntsville] , thanks so much for joining us today.
DR. SPENCER: You’re welcome, Rush.
RUSH: Now, refresh people’s memories. You called the program once a few weeks ago discussing why you deviate from the established belief of manmade global warming. Your hypothesis basically is that precipitation is one of the primary factors and the computer models don’t measure precipitation because we can’t figure out — we don’t have the equipment, sophistication to even measure — total precipitation on the planet on a daily basis. Correct?
DR. SPENCER: Well, let’s be a little more specific than that. Basically, precipitation systems act as the atmosphere’s air conditioner. It’s kind of like in your house, the air is constantly being recycled, right? Well, precipitation systems constantly recycle the atmosphere’s air. The air you were breathing was probably, in the last few days, going through a precipitation system. Those systems are what cause most of the earth’s greenhouse effect, which is water vapor and clouds.
RUSH: Precisely. I remember. When you say “most,” could you attach a percentage of greenhouse-gases to water vapor?
DR. SPENCER: Over 90%. Our addition of CO2 has enhanced the greenhouse effect by maybe 1% so far.
RUSH: Okay. So that’s automobiles, exhalation of human breath, factory smoke stacks, all these things that we’re being told are really polluting the planet are really such a small percentage of the so-called greenhouse gases. By the way, is it a bad thing the planet might warm up?
DR. SPENCER: I don’t know. I think that’s a toss up.
RUSH: If you go back and look at — I forget what it was called, but back in the days of the Vikings, they were able to grow crops and so forth in Greenland, able to traverse the North Atlantic and come to North America. The Northern Hemisphere was a lot more fertile than it was. My point is that the idea that global warming is destructive, calamitous and deadly is a bit absurd.
DR. SPENCER: Yes. I think a little bit warmer would actually be better and I think the extra CO2… They estimate crop productivity has gone up 15 percent just because of the extra CO2 we’ve put in the atmosphere.
RUSH: So it’s a good thing in ways. All right. Now, I’m titillated here. Cold air, unusually cold air is responsible for the subtropical storm off the coast of Georgia?
DR. SPENCER: Yeah. The hint there is it’s not a tropical storm; it’s a subtropical storm. These things don’t usually form. It’s been a few years since we’ve had one like this. But it didn’t happen because of unusually warm ocean water. It happened because there was unusually cold air that came unusually far south, and there was such a contrast between that cold air mass and the sea surface temperatures which are running about normal in that area that then that can lead to a storm. Remember, most storminess on the earth is related to temperature contrasts.
RUSH: Right. Unusually cold air that came unusually far south.
DR. SPENCER: Right. If we’re going to start blaming that on global warming, then you can explain anything with global warming.

Emphasis mine.

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