Gee this is alarming

Right on cue along comes Niwa with a scary headline: Last decade warmest on record - Niwa

Maybe there is something to this global warming business after all.

Or then again maybe not.

The article has to concede that

However, a WMO prediction that 2009 would be the warmest year on record was not borne out in New Zealand, which saw slightly cooler-than-average temperatures.

as well as noting

Data on temperature change across the decade was first collected in New Zealand in the 1960s

So out of, at most five decades, the 2000s were the warmest - always assuming the methodology to determine such things is valid of course.

Anyway the linked story finishes with this little nugget

New Zealand also missed out on much of the extreme weather which last year caused devastating floods, severe droughts, and storms in many parts of the world.

China suffered its worst drought in 50 years, while tropical cyclones lashed the Pacific, causing floods which left 900 dead in the Philippines.

So the climatic Armageddon is bypassing little old New Zealand thus far?

Well according to the insurance industry

We've made it through a year of relatively few natural disasters, German re-insurer Munich Re said Tuesday, but climate change is still a threat and the failed Copenhagen summit ensures costs will rise in the future.

Munich Re said natural catastrophes took many fewer lives and caused much less damage on average in 2009 than in the previous decade.

In an annual look at the cost of natural disasters, the re-insurance giant said: "Losses were far lower in 2009 than in 2008 due to the absence on the whole of major catastrophes and a very benign North Atlantic hurricane season."

It put the death toll this year at "around 10,000," well below the average of 75,000 in each of the past 10 years.

So the world isn't ending quite yet in the rest of the world either.