The state of ClimateGate today, Jan 4 2010. [krakatoa]

Happy New Year to all. I tried to look at a computer screen as little as possible over the holidays. There was football to be watched, various beasts to be cooked & eaten, and general revelry to be had.

A scan of my usual sources looks to be mostly stories on record cooling. so I don't know that I missed much. But...

If anyone has some big stories from the past 10 days or so that didn't find the light of day, please post in the comments and they may end up in my next ClimateGate entry.

On to the normal post:

(A series of daily-ish roundups of the day's Climate news and commentary.)

This is by no means a comprehensive recap. The stories come from a variety of sources, and I highly recommend exploring the linked sites for more breaking news.

(after the break...)

Lawyers know better than anyone: Never let a crisis go to waste.

A group of 12 Gulf Coast residents whose homes were damaged by Katrina are suing 33 energy companies for greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contributed to the global warming that allegedly made the hurricane worse.

Prompting my one very old lawyer joke:

Q: What's black and brown and looks great on a lawyer?

A: A Doberman Pincher.

The Polar Bears are Coming! That's what Arctic Siege means, right?

Proof of global cooling? You wish. Record snowfall & lethal avalanche activity can only be caused by one thing:

Swiss Alpine Club avalanche expert Ueli Mosimann blamed the disaster on warm weather in the region last week...

I'll go them one further, and blame it on the warming in the 1940's, when the swiss glaciers were melting faster than they are today.

Lots more stories on the record cold being reported world-wide at Climate Depot.

Bono solves all our problems.

As does Richard Branson.

Short answer?

(Are you sitting down? You'll never see this coming.)

Taxes. Yeah, I know. When all you've got is a hammer...

Both continue to sidestep the issues of their own supersized carbon footprints.

WUWT posts a series of YouTube vids with Burt Rutan skewering AGW.

Also from WUWT, it looks like the Met has finally learned the only tried and true method of predicting the weather: Looking out the window and/or reading an actual thermometer.

Met then:

The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed its earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.

Met now:

They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating.

And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder.

The Polar Bears are Coming! (for real this time)

Scientists: Polar bear populations are plummeting! Tax Carbon! Fly me to Rio! er. Tax Carbon!

Inuit: Say, we're seeing an awful lot of polar bears these days. More than normal really.

Scientist: Anecdote! The only way to count bears is to tag a few and then extrapolate!

Inuit: We have many words for "snow" in our language, but only one word for "extrapolate". That word is "guess".

Scientists: Denier! Besides, even if there are 10 times as many Polar bears now as in 1950, they are still endangered because if they can't eat seals, they don't eat anything. You're just seeing the starving Polar bears who are incapable of hunting anything other than seals.

Inuit: Then why do I keep running into so many fat polar bears? In all your, um, sciencing, did you miss some land-based seal population?

Scientists: Shut up, that's why. Tax Carbon!

The state of ClimateGate today, Jan 4 2010. [krakatoa]&bodytext=Happy New Year to all. I tried to look at a computer screen as little as possible over the holidays. There was football to be watched, various beasts to be cooked & eaten, and general revelry to be had. A...&topic=world_news"> posted by xgenghisx at 05:10 PM

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