Friday morning I came out to find some ice and snow on my truck. Not a lot, just a little to let me know that winter was here. In this part of the world, snow is uncommon in November. It happens once a decade or so. We’ll see some snow in December, January and February, but that’s usually it. The Mid-Atlantic has some strange weather because of the topography. It can get quite tropical in the summer with high humidity and thunderstorms every night. August in Washington is how most cultures imagine Hell. It is hot. It is sticky. It is full of sinners wailing in agony.

Anyway, we had an unusually mild summer with only a few hazy, hot and humid days. The fall came on early and now winter is on us a month ahead of schedule. And yet the global warming crazies continue to claim we are about to burn up.

Fueled by record warm ocean temperatures, October was Earth’s warmest such month on record, according to new data from three independent sources.

Coming after the warmest September on record and the warmest June through August period, the year is virtually certain to set a milestone for the warmest year.

This could mark an end in a temporary slowdown in the rate of warming, which scientists think has been caused by a mix of manmade and natural factors, which has lasted for about the past 15 years. One of those factors was cooling ocean waters in parts of the Pacific, which appears to be reversing in a big way.

Based on preliminary NASA data, the planet’s average temperature tied with 2005 for the warmest October since records began in 1880. Surface data from Japan’s Meteorological Agency shows it was the warmest October, hands down, while the University of Alabama at Huntsville’s satellite dataset pegged the monthly average temperature as the warmest in its records, which date back to 1979, in a tie with October 2012.

The satellite data offers somewhat of an independent check on the surface information, since satellites measure the global average temperature differently than surface weather stations.

The actual rankings from the different centers, especially for an individual month, are not as important as the longterm trend in global average temperatures, which also shows a warming planet, due largely to the buildup in manmade greenhouse gases.

The cult of global warming was an easy one to spot. In fact, it is just another manifestation of the weirdo nature cults popular in the 60’s. In the 60’s and 70’s goofballs and lunatics wanted everyone to become with nature. When everyone decided they liked civilization the hippies got mad and the result was the environmental movement. That’s where the government pushed people around in the name of the banana slugs and wombats. When that was not enough they began claiming the gods were vexed with us and were setting the planet aflame.

Just for the heck of it I tried to find a single city on earth that reported a record temperature in October and I came up empty. Around here we had a few days pushing the record for cold. Eurasian snow pack is setting records, which apparently strongly correlates to bad winters in North America. Otherwise, I was unable to find any evidence of record temps anywhere in October. I’m not a climatologist, but global warming should result in actual warming somewhere if it is a real thing. But, that’s not really the point. It never was.