For the third year running there are signs of an abnormally hard winter in many parts of the world.
Not many people in Britain were aware, I suspect, that 20 per cent of the entire United States was last week covered in snow, the greatest October snow cover the country had known for years (for details see the Watts Up With That website). Similarly unseasonable snowfalls blanketed central Europe and the Alps. Freak October snows caused traffic chaos in New Zealand. Hundreds of Tibetan herdsmen had to be rescued when blizzards swept their summer pastures weeks early.
This is now the third year running when there have been signs of an abnormally cold winter across large parts of the world. Last year's October snowfalls in the US broke records which in some cases had stood for over a century, prefacing one of America's coldest winters for decades. This summer's Arctic ice-melt stopped nearly 1 million square kilometres short of its record low in 2007. Around Antarctica this year's sea ice-melt was the lowest recorded since satellite data began in 1979, leaving the ice 30 per cent above its 30-year average.
What a startling contrast is provided by all these events in the real world to the ever more surreal frenzy of the warmists as – with only weeks to go before their doomed Copenhagen treaty conference in December – they make a last desperate bid to keep climate change hysteria at fever pitch.