Global warming stories on the rise – why?

If anyone had read my previous posts on the number of google stories, you may know that I don’t exactly trust google. There was e.g. the way during climategate that the auto suggest feature failed to suggest climategate. Then there’s the way that if you search for “WUWT” the second rated story is one of WUWT closing down (a very old story which surely is strangely prominent, as is the other negative stories on WUWT if you search google?) Then there is the way that sceptical websites are consistently downgraded on the google listing. All in all, google have not exactly excelled at portraying themselves as being honest on this issue.
So, when I started posting on the google numbers of hits on global warming, I realised that simply highlighting this number may cause it to change if the google spin machine went into action again, so with that proviso, I don’t know how to take the recent edging upwards of the google newscount for global warming.
One thing google can’t change is the nature of these stories. The trend remains clearly toward scepticism. indeed, some days I’m surprised how hostile they are, and it is an effort to find any that support the scare. But other days it will be back to the “normal” journalists trying to wring blood out of the dry global warming scare story. What is notable, is that by and large, it is the majority of smaller regional papers that tend to be more hostile questioning and informative and the larger nationals that tend to the alarmist mentality of simply repeating the press releases of this or that organisation.
But whatever the reason, whether it is something to do with the “highest CO2 release ever” or  Joplin tornado which did catch the eye of a few media, or whether it is some concerted effort to raise the profile, the figure has gone up from the high 5000s up to the low 7000s.
This is not just a statistical fluke, but a significant increase.