What's overheated are the "hottest year" claims

John McLean on the latest warmist hype:

The ABC headline screams "2010 the hottest year on record" and News Corp says "2010 warmest ever year says UN weather agency". Forgive me if I'm not excited. Not only did the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) actually headlined its media release, "2010 equals record for world's warmest year" but there are plenty of other reasons not to attach much significance to the claim.

There's a huge difference between "hottest year" and "equal warmest", especially when the difference between 2010 temperatures and 1998, 12 years earlier, was not statistically significant. The WMO states that two-hundredths of a degree separated 2010, 2005 and 1998, and that means that these high points are rather well spread over the 12 years, so much so that you would think the temperature was nearly flat.

The WMO media statement says that the data came from the UK's Hadley Centre and two other sources, but data directly from the Hadley Centre tells a different story. It shows the 2010 average temperature anomaly (the variation from the 1961-90 average) as being +0.468. It gives 2005 as +0.474 and 1998 as +0.529, leaving 1998 as still the peak temperature after 12 years and incidentally after the addition of plenty of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So much for claims of accelerated warming driven by a common greenhouse gas.

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