A couple of weeks ago The Washington Post ran a story about the recent correction of surface temperature measurements the wonderful Steve McIntyre brought to NASA’s attention. Actually, as is to be expected with the Post, they didn’t report on the correction, but instead weighed in some time after it broke to report complaints by the alarmists that some skeptics had gone too far with claims about how much this proves or disproves. Distractions aside, we do know that the correction dramatically revised some of the global warming alarmists’ money quotes, like Al Gore’s claim that nine of the 10 “hottest” years on record were in the past decade. Of course now we know that of the 10 (warmest) years, four occurred in the 1930s, three in the 1990s, and one each in this decade, the 1950s and the 1920s.
The author of yesterday’s story, “In Northern France, Warming Presses Fall Grape Harvest Into Summertime,” apparently missed the prior story, and gets front-page treatment in the process to go on about the horrors confronting vintners:
Throughout the wine-producing world, from France to South Africa to California, vintners are in the vanguard of confronting the impact of climate change. Rising temperatures are forcing unprecedented early harvests, changing the tastes of the best-known varieties of wine and threatening the survival of centuries-old wine-growing regions.
How unprecedented? Well, so far as we can tell, since 1978, from which year, the Post reports, the date on which a certain farmer in Northern France harvested his grapes has moved up by nearly two months.
Casual observers of the issue might recall 1978 as the approximate end of the 30-year cooling trend, or, if one prefers, the beginning of the subsequent 30 years’ warming of the same, er, degree. No mention of that in the story.