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 It's freaking cold!2007 featured several cold snaps in the Southern Hemisphere. For example, South Africa on June 27 (source: Bloomsberg.com): Johannesburg recorded its first confirmed snowfall for almost 26 years overnight as temperatures dropped below freezing in South Africa's largest city, grounding flights at its main airport... Light snowfall was also recorded in Pretoria, the capital, which last had snow on June 11, 1968, the newswire said. Similarly, in Australia had a cooler than usual June according to The Sunday Telegraph: LAST month Australians endured our coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we've horked up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we're still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War. What the science says...An anomalous cold snap doesn't mean global warming isn't happening. Global warming doesn't mean every spot on the earth is uniformally warming but that the average global temperature is rising. While there have been some regions unusually cool in 2007, globally from January to May, 2007 is tied with 1998 as the hottest year on record. Incidentally, 1998 was an unusually hot year as it featured the strongest El Nino of the century. There has been little to no El Nino effect in 2007.
Climate change is concerned with long term trends. Weather is chaotic and unpredictable - if you want to filter out the noise of weather, take a moving 5 year average to check out longer term climate trends. NASA GISS's graph of temperature over the past century features each yearly average (the black dots) and a moving 5 year average (the red line). This shows a clear, continuing warming trend.
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The skeptic argument...