Was September Really So Cool? Not in Switzerland

As the internet buzzes with talk of NASA's latest finding that the Greenland ice sheet is shrinking faster than expected, an article in today's New York Times quotes Max Maisch, an expert on glaciers at the University of Zurich, lamenting the shrinking state of Switzerland's glaciers. This year was a terrible year for the glaciers, said Max Maisch,... July was very hot, though August was cool; but September was the warmest in 140 years. Many glaciers are collapsing on the edges. Maisch's observation of warm September temperatures in Europe flies in the face of a recent NOAA report, discussed here last week, which emphasized that September was cooler in the U.S. relative to the precending several months, while stating in the same new release that the "January-September 2006 combined temperature is the warmest on record." While temperatures may have been briefly lower in the U.S., clearly not everyone on the planet was enjoying a cool September this year.