The Age - "2008 coolest since 2000"

Surely not a climate realist article in The Age? No way. After that vaguely encouraging headline, the rest of the article is typical alarmism. Every mention of cooling is always refuted by a scary mention of warming:

[Global climate research data] shows that even a cool year for the noughties was a hot one by historical standards. Average temperatures across the world last year were 0.325 degrees warmer than the average between 1961 and 1990, which meteorologists use as a benchmark period.

Last year was 0.69 degrees hotter than the average temperatures around the world in the 75 years from 1850 to 1924, before global temperatures really began to rise. [As you'd expect since the globe is recovering from the Little Ice Age ... whoops, three dirty little words - Ed]

Temperatures in Australia are rising even faster. The Bureau of Meteorology reports that the average temperature last year across the continent was 0.41 degrees hotter than in the benchmark period. It was the coolest year since 2001, yet our 14th hottest year in 99 years of monitoring. [99 years is like a a blink of an eye in climate terms - Ed]

Just to give you an idea of the balanced nature of The Age's reporting, the article uses the word "warmer" just once, "cool", "cooling" or "coolest" four times, and the words "hot", "hotter" and "hottest" no less than 12 times! And this is supposed to be an article about the coolest year since 2000!

You really have to laugh, or else you'd go mad.

Read it here.