CapitalClimate: Hype-ocracy PM Update

The graph shows snow depth on the ground in Washington on Christmas for each year since 1929. By the way, the 7" last year, while tying the record for the period, had completely disappeared the next day. Note to Ice Ager Linkbot Tom N: If you can find a trend in that data, you deserve to beat out Fred the Singe-r for the Nobel Prize in Cherry Picking.

Al Fin: Global Cooling Strikes Earth With a Vengeance?

An unusually cold and snowy December has struck across Europe, Wales, Ireland -- even Australia!!! This extreme cold goes against a brief, but multi-decadal trend of warming winters, and has many people asking whether there is an underlying (and unforeseen by climatologists) reason for the apparent switch in climate regimes?

Climate researcher David Archibald believes that there is something different about Solar Cycle 24 PDF. Archibald has come out publicly predicting that this solar cycle, and the one following, will be cycles of extremely low solar activity. Such an extended period of low solar activity may be similar to a historic cold spell that occurred between 1790 and 1830.

- Bishop Hill blog - Scientists and bureaucrats

Other people have questioned Ward's role at the Grantham Institute - it is unusual in the extreme for a university to employ someone to denigrate anyone who might question a particular point of view, as Pielke Jnr has pointed out. Yet here we have a different aspect to Ward's role - attacking the government cuts with a degree of vigour that even the official opposition don't seem to have managed yet.

How then to make sense of this dual role - climate rottweiler and public spending doberman? One feasible explanation is that he is employed to denigrate climate sceptics, but is a "concerned citizen" as regards the public spending round. But then again, perhaps this is all just part of a single role - one in which Ward is simply paid to defend the considerable vested interests of the scientific bureaucracy.