Chis Turner at MNN has a good point that most alarmists will ignore
Hey, hot enough for ya? Global warming, more like global melting, amirite? It’s so hot out there even the coal lobbyists are rolling up their sleeves. It’s so scorching they’re using Rush Limbaugh’s hot air to cool down the offices at GOP HQ. It’s so sweltering even Glenn Beck’s hugging polar bears. It’s so hot I don’t even know what I meant by that last one.
Point being: it’s been a pretty hot summer in many parts of North America, and this has inspired numerous climate change commentators to point out that global warming is very real and happening right now. Which is true. But here’s the question they should be asking themselves: Is it effective communication? Does it help to dismiss falsehoods and mobilize action on climate change? Does it make any sense to talk about weather as a way of talking about climate change?
I’m inclined to think it doesn’t. Quite the opposite — it plays into a terribly ineffective frame for public engagement on climate change, one that equates the infinite variability of the weather in any one place with the status of the Earth’s climate as a whole. This conversation validates the frame used by climate change denialists by its very structure.
Weather is not climate. Long term weather creates climate. But, for the Warmists, everything is proof of global warming, er, climate change. I’m sure if I spend a few minutes searching, I could find some Warmist who is blaming the lack of US landfalling hurricanes (well over 1,000 days) on anthropogenic global warming/climate change, despite them all buying into the UN IPCC report, along with others, that said hurricanes were going to get stronger and more prevalent.
Most of us “skeptics” understand that the climate has generally gotten a bit warmer since the end of the Little Ice Age, and that it is primarily nature caused. We also understand that shitty weather will happen no matter what the climate.
Also “long term” weather (weather being over a few years period) does not make climate either. Climate to me is something about 10 years or more worth.
Climate to me is weather over hundreds and thousands of years.
Has there been warm weather in the last 100 years comparable to today? If you can say yes, then it is no different, thus the climate has not changed (within that period).
(is glenn beck hugging those drowning polar bears?)
You must want future generations to die, don’t you? You’re. One of them anti-science Republican fundies I keep hearing about. And you’re probably funded by Big Coal, too!
wait.. how’d ya guess? Don’t tell anyone or they’ll send me to those re-education camps you hear about in Cancun or S. America.
Actually, we’re holding it in sunny Durbin, South Africa this year.