I had a similar idea at the time. Rather than a chopshop, though, I figured somebody, somewhere, had need for a passenger jet for something nefarious. Or for that matter, something legitimate, but that the authorities would find nefarious. Basically, a need for a large jet, that for some reason could not be obtained through normal channels.

The longer it is that no unexplained jet shows up doing something no major airline expects, though, increases the probability that I've been watching too many spy movies.....

Wow. The straw men in this article are thick and fast.
Nowhere did I state that 2 cold winters were more important than a 15 year average. I just pointed out that the "single winter" that the GP discounted was not only a single winter, but was significantly more "unimportant outlier data" than what they were admitting to.

So, what caused the cooling trend from 1880 to 1905 or so? It would be very interesting to see data back to 1000 A.D plotted on that graph, which was roughly the middle of the Medieval Maximum, with temperatures roughly what they are today.

The scientific community as a whole once believed the world was flat.
The scientific community as a whole once believed chocolate and red wine were bad for you. Or was that good for you? No, it was bad. No...good.
The scientific community as a whole has changed its mind on many things in the past, as new research has been done, or flaws in old research and methodologies have been found.

A huge part of the basis of science is attempting to disprove theories with new research. When you fail to question conventional wisdom, it's not science. It's religion.

I didn't use either of those words in my post. Stop trying to straw man me.

I find that figure for Europe very difficult to believe, as last year was full of news stories from Europe of below average temperatures. Can't say anything about Russia, as I don't read or speak the language, and don't really follow english language Russia Today.

I'm not preoccupied with US weather. That was just the map that the poster I replied to used.

Now, in response to yours, it shows that Antarctica is for the most part .5 to 2 degrees colder than the 1951-1980 average, yet the global warmists are saying that massive ice sheets are breaking off and melting because of (record?) high Antarctic temperatures.

Sorry, that Central Park temperature of 4 degrees F converts to -16 C, not 16 C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

January 6, 2014, Chicago, -16 F. Previous record of -14 F set in 1884.
January 7, 2014,Central Park in New York City was 4 F (16 C). The previous record low for the day was set in 1896.

Oh...that's right. You only asked for a single one.
Well, perhaps these southern Ontario record breaking lows will make you feel better, as they're not quite 100 years old:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blog...

Hamilton hit -22 C, previous record of -17.2 C set on March 4, 1962.
London, -24 C, previous record of -22.8 C, set in 1950.
Windsor, -17 C, previous record of -14.4 C, set in 1943.

Heh heh. True. But there does seem to be a fairly large population of fools on the Internet, doesn't there?

0 A.D. was a bit cooler than it is now. By 1000 A.D. global temperatures had warmed to roughly what we're at now. Then it cooled down again, reaching a minimum somewhere around 1700 A.D. (which, incidentally, is what the global warming apologists frequently use as the pre-industrial average temperature, rather than an unusually cold minimum.) Then it started warming again, until about 1997, when it appears to have leveled off again.

Did Jesus develop lots if industrial technologies that caused a rise in CO2 and a corresponding rise in temperatures for the next 1000 years? Did an economic downturn in 1000 A.D. cause Jesus Industries Inc. to collapse, reducing CO2 output, and thereby cooling the earth off for the next 500 years or so? There must have been a cause, and since we all know that human produced CO2 is the only possible thing that affects global temperatures, that must have been it, right?

When I say the climate has always been in flux, I don't mean we've been in and out of ice ages for millions of years, with a 20,000 year static climate between ice ages, and an 80,000 year static climate during an ice age. I mean it's been in flux. Every single year is either warmer or colder than the year before it. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a static climate on earth. Man-made CO2 global warming models all seem to assume that the climate would be roughly static between ice ages, but for human-caused warming. All evidence points to this assumption being false.

An ice age is a period (an incredibly long one, I might add) of very cold, very dry weather across the entire planet. Of course it's weather related.

No, me deciding to work from home today rather than starting my car to drive to the office isn't going to start an ice age, so in that sense you're right, but you're using the most narrowly defined meaning of weather you possibly can, to avoid the fact that the climate of the earth has been in constant flux for millions of years, and somehow, now, the global warming apologists are convinced that we're suddenly causing it, and if we stopped burning fossil fuels, then the climate would become static.

So you're saying the arctic air is warmer than the air half way to the equator?

My high school OAC (grade 13, for non-Ontarians) chemistry mark was the highest of any student, in any school in the county, for both semesters of the year I took that class. I got an award for it, actually.

The amount of energy needed to melt ice into water without changing the temperature (remaining at 0 degrees C) is the exact same as the amount of energy you need to remove to freeze water into ice without changing the temperature. Which makes your claim about time scales (WTF does time have to do with energy transfer and average temperatures of a region, anyway?) complete, unadulterated bullshit.

According to that map, the UK was 1-2 degrees warmer than normal, and much of northern Europe was 2-4 degrees warmer than normal. Yet, news reports state the UK's summer was one of the coldest in decades, 5-6 degrees C colder than normal, the end of 2014 was also exceptionally cold, and while Feb 2014 was slightly above average, during the 2004 to 2014 period, it was only 0.4 degrees higher than the 1860's average for the period from 2005 to 2014, which at 5.2 degrees is also the exact same as the February average for 2014 only.
How does a slight, less than one degree warming over 150 years for one month counteract the 5-6 degree colder summer and "bitterly cold" end of the year?

I stand by my assertion that something is seriously wrong with how we measure average global temperatures.