You can find more posts on climate change science, policy, and news on Climate 411.
According to the scientific groups that track global temperature, January 2008 was the coldest month in several years.
Is it true, as DailyTech concludes (in a post picked up by the DrudgeReport), that January's cold "wipes out a century of warming"? Has global warming stopped?
This is akin to the claim that "global warming stopped in 1998". (See "Most bizarre new contrarian claim" at this RealClimate post.)
Let's look at the data. They do indeed show that global temperatures last month were lower than they have been in several years. For example, here is a graph from the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre, showing monthly global temperatures from 1850 to January 2008 (the raw data are described here).
January 2008 (circled in red) is quite low relative to other months the past decade or so. But look at all the previous months that were colder than January 2008 (below the red line). By the same argument these folks are trying to make, global warming stopped in (for example) March 1976, December 1984, November 1992, and February 1994.
The point is that global warming is a long-term process, occurring over decades. It's not something that is proven or disproven by any single month.
Notes
Anthony Watts compiled data from all the major scientific organizations that report global temperatures. In that post he clarifies that
The website DailyTech has an article citing this blog entry as a reference, and their story got picked up by the Drudge report, resulting in a wide distribution....
I wish to state for the record, that this statement is not mine: "–a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years"
There has been no "erasure". This is an anomaly with a large magnitude, and it coincides with other anecdotal weather evidence. It is curious, it is unusual, it is large, it is unexpected, but it does not "erase" anything.
To learn more about how scientists "take the globe's temperature", see these posts at RealClimate and Climate 411.
You can find more posts on climate change science, policy, and news on Climate 411.