No matter how cool, the alarmists will always find an angle . . .

2008 is shaping up to be the coolest year since 2001, and yet the media can always dig up an alarmist who can spin it into bad news, to keep the AGW bandwagon of doom rolling (and of course, the cash flooding in). The alarmist in question is Prof Barry Brook, whose amusing title is "Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change" at Adelaide University, which the Adelaide Advertiser (probably the worst newspaper in Australia) reports without question, under the doom-laden headline:

"Year of extremes sparks climate woes"

The article uses the phrase "on record" no less than seven times, without bothering to point out that "on record" means as a maximum in the last 150 years (many stations being far more recent), which, in geological terms is a gnat's whisker, and almost totally irrelevant. Self-Interest Alert:

University of Adelaide climate change professor Barry Brook labelled 2008 as "more climatically damaging" in SA, causing incredible stress to plant and animal life.

Professor Brook said 2008 was a year of extremes. "We had that heatwave, of course, in March and yet we had a cool winter," he said.

"The fact that we had that heatwave makes 2008 more climatically damaging than the past 50 years or more."

Professor Brook said temperature extremes were going to become more common but annual average temperature records would not clearly portray these extremes and the severe effects of climate change.

So no matter what the temperature records show, the effects of "climate change" would always be hidden, right? And if that's not enough, don't forget that even though it's cooler now, warming is still going on...

National Climate Centre senior climatologist Dr Andrew Watkins said 2008 was still warmer than previous La Nina years, in a sign climate change had caused warmer-than-normal temperatures.

A La Nina event relates to cooler-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

"Even though this year should have been a relatively cool year, it was warmer than all but two years since the beginning of this century," Dr Watkins said.

Which is exactly what you would expect, since temperatures have been climbing gently since the Little Ice Age (which no-one ever mentions, of course).

Read it here.