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[Galapagos]

I stuck my nose in the climate science blogosphere and turned up some interesting stuff.

First, C Beck from A Few Things Ill Considered shares a gargantuan compilation of climate science news, and apparently one that can be expected weekly:
A Few Things Ill Considered : Another Week of GW News, January 11, 2009


Also, a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters on Dec 30 2008 entitled "How unusual is the recent series of warm years?" attempts to answer the question asked in the title:

Originally Posted by Abstract

Previous statistical detection methods based partially on climate model simulations indicate that, globally, the observed warming lies very probably outside the natural variations. We use a more simple approach to assess recent warming at different spatial scales without making explicit use of climate simulations. It considers the likelihood that the observed recent clustering of warm record-breaking mean temperatures at global, regional and local scales may occur by chance in a stationary climate. Under two statistical null-hypotheses, autoregressive and long-memory, this probability turns to be very low: for the global records lower than p = 0.001, and even lower for some regional records. The picture for the individual long station records is not as clear, as the number of recent record years is not as large as for the spatially averaged temperatures.

Good coverage for those of us out of the loop over at Open Mind:

‘Tain’t Likely Open Mind
Every year this century is among the top-10 hottest years on record. In fact the clustering of hottest years is even more lop-sided than that would indicate; by the end of 2006 it was noted that the 13 hottest years on record had all occurred since 1990 (and we’ve added a couple more to that list since then). How unlikely is that?

Precisely that question is addressed in “How unusual is the recent series of warm years?” (Zorita et al. 2008, Geophysical Research Letters 35, L24706 doi:10.1029/GL036228). The conclusion can be summed up in a phrase best said with a strong Maine accent: ’tain’t likely.

I also stumbled across this: a recent Pew survey indicates that the same crowd known for rejecting the fact of evolution--conservative Republicans -- also doubt that humans have played a part in climate change more than other affiliations.
Why is the Right associated with such anti-scientific sentiments? Is this really the best we can do-- either the Democrats, or the anti-science religious nutters? It didn't seem like much of a choice on election day, and this data further reflects that asymmetric dichotomy.