Pssst, don't tell the climate change deniers, but despite the fact that parts of the world had a colder-than-average winter, the planet as a whole somehow still managed to have the warmest January ever recorded:
"It's not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven't warmed in the past 50 years," veteran Australian climate scientist Neville Nicholls told an online climate science media briefing.
"January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we've ever seen," said Nicholls of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne.
Nicholls continues:
"Last November was the hottest November we've ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen," he said of the satellite data record since 1979.
You've probably heard a lot of this before, but it bears repeating:
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000.
Of course, as long as it's snowing somewhere, scientists will still have the wearisome task of reminding the less complicated folks among us that there's a difference between weather and climate:
"Global warming is a trend superimposed upon natural variability, variability that still exists despite global warming," said Kevin Walsh, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne.
For my money, he could have just said, "Hey dumbasses, just because you fart in your backyard doesn't mean they can smell it in China", but I understand that he's probably constrained to be a bit more subtle than that.