Global Warming and the Cold Winter

This winter I was working outside. It was so warm, I had to take off my coat . I had a light fall jacket I had on underneath. But soon that was too hot. Well I thought, I guess this winter is not cold after all. What do you mean I am insane? Who cares if the it has been dipping below -30? Why does it matter that the cold lasted for months and the warming has been here a few days? It is warm now. So the cold never happened.

I have had to hear a lot about global warming being garbage because of how cold it is. I've heard it every cold winter for the past twenty years. The message is clear. One cold winter makes years of rising temperatures magically go away. So five days of warm weather magically makes a cold winter go away. Logically it follows. What is the difference?

Of course there is no difference. Both are insane! Well there is one difference. I do not believe that this winter was warm. Five days do not make a winter. Yet millions believe one cold winter disproves global warming.

Imagine the sun itself heating up. Imagine it expanded into a huge red giant and swallowed mercury and Venus. Imagine the oceans could boil off and all life dies. This would still not stop the temperature from going up and down. There will always be colds years. There will always be warm years. There will be cold months in hot years. There will be hot days in cold months. It is called weather!

There are two different words for what it is like outside, weather and climate. Climate is very stable and predictable. Climate stays the same for centuries. If it does change, it does so slowly, not by one or two degrees in a year but by a piece of a degree in a decade. Weather changes all the time. It can go from ten degrees above normal to ten degrees below normal in one day.₁ This is why we hate our weather man.

In 1988 time magazine ran a cover with a picture of the Earth melting. This was when global warming first came to the attention of Joe Public. In the twenty years since at least fifteen of those years were above the old average. The general trend is for those years to get hotter and hotter. To to put it another way, for the last twenty years there has been a warming. This warming has taken place in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, all of the oceans, and Antarctica too.₂ This means this warming has been global.


Most important of all, this means the scientists predicting global warming have been right for twenty years. I think twenty years in more than a coincidence. I know a guy who has been making money betting on baseball for twenty years. He ain't just just lucky. Twenty years is a hell of a record. If he wants to tell me his picks, I'm going to have to bet them. I am betting on the climate scientists that have been right for twenty years too.

It is one thing to arguing against global warming continuing. It one thing to argue against global warming being man made. But how can you argue that global warming has not happened. The temperature has gone up, so it happened. It is like arguing plants don't grow in dirt and water isn't wet.

Global warming, so far, is list of recorded facts, not the opinion of scientists. For every city in US the number of days in a year over 90 Fahrenheit has gone up. The number of days in a year over 100 Fahrenheit has gone up. Global warming is recorded in the spread of the pine beetle. It is recorded in the number of species moving toward the poles. It is recorded in the rise in deaths due to heat stroke, the melting of glaciers all around the world, the early arrival of spring, and the delay of winter. Global warming is proven by the gradual rising of the average yearly temperature all around the world. And that is the very definition of global warming.

However it got here and whether or not it lasts, Global warming of the last half a century is not opinion. It is a mountain of unbiased, unchangeable, recorded facts entered in to permanent public record for all to see. One cold winter does not change that.


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1 Don't tell me it can't change twenty degrees in one day. I've seen it twice in my forty six years.

2 You might have heard that it has gotten colder in Antarctica. No. As a whole it has gotten warmer in the antarctic. It was reported in the media that East Antarctica has been cooling. Because of bad reporting, This has come out as the entire antarctic continent getting cooler. But for years several scientist have made it clear Antarctica as a whole has been warming. The new data shows that even East Antarctica has been warming. (though just)

Global warming, not North America warming, not European warming, not any particular spot on the earth warming. Parts of England have cooled also. But temperature in the United Kingdom have gone up over the whole. There is no large area of the planet that has not gone up in temperature. Only tiny isolated areas have got cooler. The rest has warmed. We have globally warmed. Isolated places and times can be ignored. Focus on the big picture