There’s been a flurry of reporting out of Great Britain in the last few days about the detection of a rapid rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. David Appell has covered this at length, with a number of posts linking to stories on this, including The Guardian and others, all somewhat breathless about the revelation.

David also links to GRIST, which uses the stories to argue that the U.S. press, in ignoring this, is a bunch of slackers with respect to climate change. The problem here, as several people pointed out in comments to GRIST, is that the story’s an old one. The AP moved a story back in March when this was first reported, which was apparently carried by the New York Times and a lot of other publications.

The puzzle here is why an eight-month-old story has been resurrected. My assumption is that this all came about because of David King’s major climate address Tuesday.