The BBC uses this NASA image with the caption "Average temperatures have not increased for over a decade." But NASA itself contradicts that assertion.

There is joy today among science skeptics who can’t stand the idea that human freedom might be curtailed by nature. Or who don’t want their profits curtailed by regulations to deal with it. Or don’t want something curtailed by anything.

I can understand oil and fossil fuel fanatics hating the idea that human-generated global warming might be real. Tobacco execs didn’t like news of lung cancer for the same reason. But if there’s half a chance global warming is as real as the great preponderance of climate scientists say, isn’t the conservative thing to do to try and conserve the climate we have?

Apparently not.

The web is suddenly awash with op-eds like Debra Saunders’ “The Global Warming Consensus Cools” today. It goes back to a BBC report “What happened to global warming?” which Instapundit and loads of others have linked to. The BBC of all sources, queen of the liberal media, has said that global warming might not be happening after all. Well, the report isn’t quite as one sided as all the crowing would suggest: it does report that the jury is still out and the proof will be in the sweating or lack of it in the next few years. It concludes:

So what can we expect in the next few years?

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

Only if you go to a site like Climate Progress, the whole BBC report by Paul Hudson gets demolished. A representative sample:

But Hudson is a Brit, so he (sort of) uses the data from the Met Office aka Hadley Center in his lede:

“This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.”

Yes, the headline was a surprise since you’re supposed to be the climate correspondent, but the headline fails to correspond to the climate, which continues to warm – as even your own friggin’ Met Office explained a few weeks ago in this online analysis:

“… trends over the past 10 years show only a 0.07 °C increase in global average temperature. Although this is only a small increase, it indicates that there has been no global cooling over this period. In fact, over the past decade, most years have remained much closer to the record global average temperature reached in 1998 than to temperatures before the 1970s. All the years from 2000 to 2008 have been in the top 14 warmest years on record.”

This brings us back to the interesting observation that it is ideological free marketers and “conservatives” who are the most radical people in the world today, or at least who are the radicals with the greatest power to put their wildly incautious, nay revolutionary, schemes into action. The actual conservatives who would like earth to remain recognizable and keep human civilization alive are those calling for awareness of our interdependence with all life, and for replacing our love affair with things with a love affair for people, other species and spiritual awareness. True conservatives, rally to Tikkun!