Our North American readers will likely have noticed that we've been having some rather unseasonably cool weather of late. Or perhaps we should say "seasonably," since though we've had a few comparatively mild autumns and winters over these past few years (at least here in southern New England), leading to widespread "global warming" freak-outs, a few points of data do not a trend make.
Though the "climate change" crowd will tell you that we've been living through the New Normal, their goddess Gaia has lately taken to making them look foolish by returning to the Old Normal. This author's propaganda-inflected cell phone apps don't know what to do with it actually -- one second blurting out notifications that today (the mildest in weeks) is "nearing record highs" for temperature; the next warning me that temps are "set to plummet overnight." Well, that's mid-November for you!
In any event, the indispensable Climate Discussion Nexus has a piece looking at just how chilly it has been, and how desperate warmists have been to explain it away.
If the continental United States had on Nov. 1 been on average 11°F warmer than normal, or even if on Halloween North Dakota alone had been 44°F warmer, the usual suspects would have no difficulty explaining the phenomenon. Instead it’s that much colder (as North Dakota was 44°F below average on Oct. 31) prompting National Geographic to scratch its wise old head and wonder if cold weather can come out of nowhere, even brutally.
As we’ve observed before, the science is totally settled on climate while weather is mysterious. And thus it is that NG, shivering in the unseasonable cold, rediscovers the unspeakably frosty winter of 1709. They write “In today’s newsletter, we examine our early chill and the mystery freak winter of 1709” that “disrupted two wars, broke church bells, froze Venice’s canals, and turned the Baltic Sea into horsepaths.” And the punchline? “What caused it? We still don’t know for sure.” Whereas the hot summer of 2023 was just like totally certainly man-made climate change.
As the link from that newsletter to the main story asks of the sudden, severe, protracted cold spell in 1709: “Could it happen again?” Of course the answer ought to be no. The air is full of “heat trapping” man-made “carbon pollution” thus heating the place to the global boiling era of fire. And if it turns out to be yes, well, don’t worry, the theory is obviously right, it’s just the facts that are mysteriously wrong.
We would like to gloat briefly here, because we actually wrote about that winter a year ago. We can’t taunt them too much, though, because we did so because of a piece in, um, National Geographic. Which we noted at the time, “in a rare nod to reality” admitted that unusually cold weather is a catastrophe causing famine and disease, a stark departure from orthodoxy that says warmth is horrible in every dimension from agriculture to health (despite abundant evidence to the contrary) and gosh if only it hadn’t warmed up since pre-industrial times.
On the plus side, we can taunt them a bit because they recycled the same story because, well, gosh, the fall of 2023 is turning out to be extremely cold in North America. Exactly as the global warming theory NG is normally all in on didn’t predict. As we have suggested, standard global warming theory did not predict this summer’s conditions and could not. It pounced on them once they hit, of course. But its take is that there’s something like a linear relationship between atmospheric CO2 and warming, so a sudden discontinuity either way doesn’t fit.
As Mark Twain said, everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. Have we forgotten why that used to be considered funny?
Article tags: climate, climate change, Climate Discussion Nexus, global warming, Mark Twain, temperature, weather
Because at one time there was no Al Gore, Greenpeace and Idiots Blocking Highways