Should We Talk About the Weather?

by Eric Martin

While it depresses me to no-end that so many on the Right side of the spectrum insist on obfuscating the nature of the climate change crisis by making sophomoric arguments - like pointing out that sometimes it snows in February, and that the presence of snow in winter supposedly disproves climate change - at least the science remains...well, based on the scientific method.

"January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we've ever seen," said Nicholls of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne.

"Last November was the hottest November we've ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen," he said of the satellite data record since 1979.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000.[...]

Scientists say global warming is not uniform in all areas and that climate models predict there will likely be greater extremes of cold and heat, floods and droughts.

"Global warming is a trend superimposed upon natural variability, variability that still exists despite global warming," said Kevin Walsh, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne.

Anyway, just as a heat spell in summer would not prove global trends in warming, neither does a cold spell in winter disprove global warming.  Importantly, weather is not the same as climate, and global trends are not manifested uniformly or instantly in all areas at once. The fact that those sentences need to be typed in order to counter prevalent GOP arguments about climate change is, as I wrote, depressing. 

And when a group resorts to such arguments, it usually indicates a lack of faith in their ability to make fact-based, coherent arguments.  It's quite a tell, really.  Or at least it should be.

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

Just to add a scientific observation of my own: Sebastian's argumentative style in this thread strongly resembles in a surprising number of ways his style when defending the pro-life talking point that simply huge numbers of late-term abortions are being carried out in the US, unrecorded, for trivial reasons.

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