There has been much discussion lately about the recent “cooling trend” in the blogosphere. RealClimate has offered up a bet that there won’t be any long-term cooling. Roger Pielke Sr. offered his commentary. James Annan covered it not once, but twice. And William Connolley had a go at it as well.

This week offers a different cooling article in the Journal of Geophysical Research by Monaghan, et al. They looked at the Recent variability and trends of Antarctic near-surface temperature. Anthony Watts has posted on it, mostly quoting from a press release. Interestingly, the image he shows is from a NASA satellite study (which looks wrong) while the paper in question uses surface stations.
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Temperature is not the best metric to assess global warming. There are several reasons to use temperature when discussing global warming. The first is that most lay people can understand what a temperature is. Energy is a more difficult concept to grasp, even though they are essentially the same thing. To get the change in energy from a change in temperature, assuming nothing else changes, one need only multiply by a constant.

But as Dr. Pielke points out on his blog What Does Moist Enthalpy Tell Us?, there can actually be a decrease in surface temperature but an increase in surface energy if the water vapor content increases. He uses the example of Yuma, Arizona.
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The National Review Online has an article by Dr. Roy Spencer called More Carbon Dioxide, Please: Raising a scientific question. A few of the “skeptics” have already jumped on the article without showing any sort of skepticism.

Almost all (-almost?) of the arguments used in the piece are those that have already been used elsewhere and refuted at Skeptical Science. Yet, for the sake of refuting them again using different language. Hopefully a few “skeptics” will read this and realize that to be a skeptic means to be skeptical of everything, even that which you already think is true.
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I’ve been grading exams again. Of course that means I’ve been wanting to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills concurrent with a bottle of vodka. I’ve resisted the urge, and with less than 10% left to go, the end is in sight. One thing that seems to be fairly prevalent is the thought that the cardinal directions West and East are synonyms for left and right, respectfully. I’m not sure where exactly that comes from, but for fun, let’s blame cartographers. On every map I’ve ever seen, North is at the top. This means that West is on the left, East is on the right, and South is at the bottom.

But the Earth is a sphere. This is no absolute direction that corresponds to up, down, left, right, forward, or backward. Those directions are dependent upon your particular orientation. At this very moment, I am facing North, so to my left is the West. But if I swivel 180 degrees (or π radians) in my chair, now East is on my left.
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