Yesterday’s Rachel Maddow Show provided me with yet another reason to love that woman. She uses footage of amazing 3-point shots in basketball to show how something out of the ordinary doesn’t disprove the ordinary. Washington has had some snowy weather recently, and the global warming deniers are loving it because they see that as proof that global warming isn’t real. They can’t tell the difference between weather and climate.
You can watch the video here, it’s fantastic and features an interview with Bill Nye the Science Guy. But her point can be summed up in this quote, which begins around 4 minutes:
If one person wins the lottery…it does not disprove the existence of the recession. When it rains in the desert, that does not disprove the existence of the desert…If you have smoked a cigarette in your life and you are not currently suffering from lung cancer or heart disease, your existence…does not disprove the fact that smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease. The evidence we have of flight (birds, bees, airplanes, what have you) does not disprove the existence of gravity. The existence of monkeys does not disprove evolution. The existence of tadpoles does not disprove the existence of frogs.
Full court shots are hard, evolution is real, gravity is real, the recession real, deserts dry, smoking bad, frogs exist, also so do storms.
The fact that it is snowing somewhere…does not tell you any useful thing about the overall climate.
This is why we get our information about climate change from scientists, not pundits.
Good Post! I’m a regular Rachel watcher and loved that segment. There was one thing Bill Nye mentioned that doesn’t get enough emphasis that can be used in arguments against deniers. The greater heat puts more energy in the system climate, this means you will get MORE of what you usually get. If snow is usual you will get more of it, if hurricanes are usual you will get more and stronger ones.
I was so upset over those idiots trying to claim the snow storm disproved global warming I had to write a post about it too:
http://dailybbg.blogspot.com/2010/02/global-warming.html
Kevin