ICYMI, Charles Cooke had a great piece up yesterday titled, “Weather is not Climate.” The opener:
Antarctic ice doesn’t discredit the warmists, but they should dial down the death-cult drama.
We are but six days into the new year, and we are already involved in another climate imbroglio — another one of those prickly brawls in which conservatives become overexcited by an anecdote and mock progressives’ most cherished beliefs, and progressives get all huffy in response and start talking about Science and “flat earthers” and “echo chambers” and the like, and shouting, too, that their opponents are mistaking today for tomorrow.
As it happens, on the specifics at least, this time the progressives are right: Clearly, that a few hapless analysts have gotten themselves stuck in the Antarctic ice no more negates the climate-change evidence than the terrible massacres we saw last year reversed the falling crime statistics. As the Guardian put it:
Some commentators have remarked on what they describe as the “irony” of researchers studying the impact of a warming planet themselves being impeded by heavy ice. With some even suggesting that the situation is itself evidence that global warming is exaggerated. In fact, the local weather patterns that brought about the rapid build up of ice that trapped the Academik Shokalskiy tell us very little about global warming. This is weather, not climate.
And yet if Chris Hayes and the Guardian are wondering why, in Hayes’s words, “in 2006, 59% of Republicans believed that there is solid evidence the Earth is warming” but “a decade later, that number has dropped to just 50%,” they might look less to the supposedly sinister influence of an always nameless “industry,” and more to their own side’s habitual embellishment. It turns out that there’s an awful lot of “weather, not climate” these days, and while it is fair to say that it’s silly to see snow out your window and conclude that the world is cooling, there isn’t much of a broader warming trend for alarmists to fall back on either.
This is to say that the green movement’s longtime reliance on hyperbole has deeply weakened its case, and it is about time it recognized that establishing a parade of hostages to fortune has not been tactically profitable. Al Gore, who apparently continues to see himself as a put-upon Cassandra, likes to talk about inconvenient truths. Instead, he might do better to focus on inconvenient predictions — an abundance of which have marked the last 40 years of climate hysteria, and which continue to damage the case in the public’s eye. Gore and his ilk can paint skeptical Americans as rubes if they wish, but pattern recognition is a valuable human trait, and the pattern in Gore’s industry is one of failure and of obfuscation. What, pray, are the leery supposed to think?
The rest here.