Hansen the hysterical

Hansen the hysterical is at it again, his latest pronouncement of doom getting full play on the pages of the Guardian.

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

There is nothing new here, just a need to counter recent stories about global temperatures flatlining and a growing public awareness that the facts and the rhetoric are out of kilter with each other.

The only useful bit of apocalyptic news for the alarmists in recent weeks has been a bit of the West Antarctic peninsula breaking off, so the story is wheeled out, yet again.

Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

As many people now realise, West Antarctica is a pensinsula which sticks out from the continent - it's not representative of the region as a whole. In fact the continent as a whole has been cooling for years, and it has been putting on mass rather than losing it. This NASA picture shows the cooling trend for 1982 to 2003 over the continent. Blue is cooling:

 

I do wonder when they are going to start being straight with us.