Headline of the Day

From the November 29th Guardian (U.K.):

Despite warm autumn, 2011 temperatures fail to reach record highs

This year was only the 11th warmest on record, but figures confirm overall warming trend

The article is based on a U.K. Met Office press release.

As Steven Goddard says at Real Science:

Translation: Temperatures have been cooling for 13 years, and 2011 is looking to finish as the first or second coldest year of the millennium. Did the UN hire a bunch of writers from Pravda when the Soviet Union collapsed?

More seriously, Dr. David Whitehouse observes:

There is a great deal of misrepresentation in this article. Somehow its twisted logic concludes that even as 2011 turns out to be a rather cool year, as it admits probably the 11th warmest on record taking us back to the temperatures in the 1990’s before the recent warmest decade on record, somehow the world’s temperature continues to rise as expected.

I will pass judgement on 2011 when all the data is in, but if it is on a par with global temperatures seen in the 1990’s -- when the decadal average was lower than the average of the past ten years -- it certainly does not indicate that temperatures are continuing upward.

Agreed. But, as before, the Met Office is offering spin, not fact, Whitehouse says:

[I]n the absence of important UN climate meetings in December of the year I wonder if the Met Office would issue estimates for the global average temperature for the previous year based on only 10 months of data (83% of the annual data). It is a most illogical thing to do, especially as sometimes the data from the final two months can make a difference, often unacknowledged afterwards.