Not even wrong

Bruce Chapman, head Disco. DJ, thinks we're going through global cooling:

It certainly seems so this spring. Winter on the East Coast was grim and summer temperatures are hard to find now in the West. Snowfall also higher than in decades past. It doesn't mean anything except this: there is (and should be) a real debate.

In fact, NASA found this to have been the hottest April on record, and the hottest January-April on record. Which is to say, this was not a notably cool spring. April also saw the lowest snowfall on record for that month.

In other words, it doesn't matter that Chapman cannot distinguish climate from weather, or that the only research he cites was presented at a Heartland Institute-funded propaganda conference, because the facts he's citing are simply wrong. Again.

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They get their mathematicians from Enron?

In other words, it doesn't matter that Chapman cannot distinguish climate from weather

Or, for that matter, local from global...

Re: climate/weather and local/global, I live in Minnesota, where it gets pretty cold most winters, regardless of what's happening elsewhere. One January it was snowing hard, windy, and with a temp of about -10. I was sitting in the break room at work when one of my colleagues, a known right-wing sympathizer, came in shaking off the snow, etc, etc. He, knowing me to be a liberal East Coast elitist, asked, "Where's your global warming now, huh?"

I thought he was joking so I laughed and said, "Yeah, it's pretty bad out there today." Then I realized he was serious, and wanted to debate. I just got up and went back to my desk. But it annoyed me for the rest of the day.

It seems so obvious a distinction, but some folks just refuse to understand.

The global/local thing is very simple. You have to understand that for Americans of the right-wing climate change denialist stripe, places outside the United States don't really exist.

By Antiquated Tory (not verified) on 27 May 2010 #permalink