Cold weather in UK brings out climate skeptics

There is very cold weather (by UK standards) in England right now. It has led to the postponement of several soccer matches on Saturday (). Predictably, reporting in the UK has attracted a lot of climate skeptics. In the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing paper, the sub-headline states “Much of the data cited to support warmist claims is pure conjecture”. Meanwhile, comments on a BBC piece are remarkably negative about the possibility of global warming. Meanwhile, in a piece in the Mail online (one of the most popular on-line newspapers, primarily because of its gossip section) which describes record low temperatures again the comments are primarily from climate changes skeptics.

This is all predictably familiar, given almost the same things happened in the U.S. in January and February of 2010 when there was a cold spell there. Nonetheless, despite the claims of the skeptics, 2010 will be one of the 3 warmest years on record according to the World Meteorological Organization with NASA suggesting it may be the warmest year ever.

Coming back to our corner of the globe, here in Alberta, there were mentions of increased development of the oil sands as Suncor and Total SA joined forces in the oil sands, and will also restart a mothballed upgrader. While I have no objection to this if it is done in an environmentally sensitive manner, in none of the press coverage could I find a single mention of Greenhouse gas emissions, or how more than 50% of GHG emissions actually come during the upgrading process. On a more positive note, however, the one way to ameliorate these may be via carbon capture and storage at the upgrader, and in a blog today the University of Calgary Law Faculty explains that it looks like any reductions in GHG emissions they can bring about may be accepted under Kyoto.

Overall, the amount of skepticism remains disheartening. As I recently wrote, the amount of evidence that global warming is occurring is greater than the evidence that smoking causes cancer, and yet a large number of individuals do not want to believe the science.