From Rupert Murdoch to Warren Buffett to, yes, John McCain

Rolling Stone has two pieces on climate politics in its latest issue, by Jeff Goodell and Tim Dickinson.  “Planet Earth 911” is on “Big Oil and Big Coal’s lobbying campaign to block progress on global warming,” and “The Climate Killers” is on Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Jack Gerard, Rex Tillerson, Sen. Mary Landrieu, The Swift Boat smearer, Inhofe, David Ratcliffe, Dick Gephardt (!), George Will, Tom Donohue, Don Blankenship, Fred Singer, Sen. John McCain (!), Rep. Joe Barton, Charles and David Koch.

I don’t agree with either piece 100% but they are well worth reading, and not just because the latter piece quotes me a couple of times.  Rolling Stone deserves a huge amount of credit for continuing to put out first-rate work on the story of the century.

Let’s look a little closer at three of RS’s “climate killers,” starting with Buffett:

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Alaska had its 17th warmest December

It was relatively cool over CONUS in December, but not closet to record-shattering, as NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported (see below).  And, as Capital Climate notes, this 14th coldest December followed the third warmest November.

Also, Alaska had its 17^th warmest December.  It’d be nice if NCDC would combine the two in reporting, since Alaska is getting baked these days.

It was a relatively warm year (again), part of a long-term warming trend even over the tiny fraction of the Earth that CONUS covers, as NCDC reports:

So, no, we’re  not cooling, as inaccuweather meteorologist Bastardi asserts, not even in the contiguous United States.  If you’d like to see just how non-record-breaking December was for CONUS, here’s the chart:

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