Quote of the Day: Letterman Corrects Donald Trump On Global Warming

“Donald Trump says today’s cold weather proves there’s no global warming. Strictly speaking, global warming doesn’t mean every day it’s going to be raging hot or that every day is hotter than the year before. It’s the same way that ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ doesn’t mean you’re going to see actual celebrities.” –David Letterman

9 Comments

  1. 1
    David Duff says:

    Ah yes, it’s always ‘weather’ when the temperature drops and ‘global warming’ when it warms up!  However, as there has been virtually no warming for 17 years it is beginning to look like the ‘warmers’ were shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre!

  2. 2
    Ron Chusid says:

    Wrong on both counts.

    Weather and climate are basic scientific terms which the scientific-literate understand and use consistently while science-deniers fail to understand. Even a comedian like Letterman had no difficulty understanding the difference.

    The claims of no warming for the past 16-17 years in the right wing media are false based upon cherry picking and manipulation of data to ignore the actual warming which has been occurring.

    Science-deniers also need to get their stories straight. There are a few different, somewhat contradictory, claims going around. The first two are totally contradictory. Most science-deniers I run into (I can’t say if they are actually in the majority based upon my experience) agree that the warming is occurring but deny that human action has any bearing on it. They then send nasty comments when I have a post about deniers, with arguments that nobody is denying that global warming is occurring. In contrast, there’s the argument you bring up which does exactly that–deny the warming which has been reported.

    On rare occasions I run into a third argument–agreeing that human action has caused climate change but claiming that scientific progress will allow us to fix it.That ignores the problems we are already experiencing such as fires in the Western US, wars due to drought in other parts of the world, and damage from recent extreme storms. I hope that they are at least right that we will be able to fix the worst problems predicted in the future, but it is foolish to ignore a problem by hoping we can fix it in the future.

    While science-deniers are all over in their claims, we have a consensus agreed to by well over 90 percent of climate scientists who have studied the data. Nobody is shouting fire in a crowded theater. We are both observing changes which have already occurred and paying attention to such a strong consensus of experts in the field, while ignoring propaganda spread by the right wing for financial and ideological reasons. As I noted in a recent post, even some businesses (other than the petroleum industry) are starting to get concerned about climate change, realizing it affects their long-term bottom line.

  3. 3
    David Duff says:

    Figure 1. Satellite-based microwave sounding unit temperatures (red line) from the University of Alabama Huntsville. Blue line shows a loess smooth, span=0.4. Data from KNMI (NCDF file, 17 Mb)
     

     
    Global warming!  What warming?
     

  4. 4
    David Duff says:

    Oooops, sorry, it failed to print the diagram but you can check it out here:
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/29/should-we-be-worried/#more-102378

  5. 5
    David Duff says:

    And from the Met Office (total prats, in my view but frightfully ‘right on’, dead keen ‘warmers’ down to their woolly mittens!
    It is only really since 2000 that the rise in global surface temperatures has paused.”
     
    http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/q/0/Paper2_recent_pause_in_global_warming.PDF

  6. 6
    Ron Chusid says:

    Again, cherry picking of data. This argument has repeatedly been debunked.

  7. 7
    Ron Chusid says:

    There are multiple responses to the false claim from the right that the earth has not been warming for past 16 years. I just pulled up the first I came across here.

  8. 8
    David Duff says:

    Well, I just quoted UAH satellite readings and the British Met Office, are they not ‘scientific’ enough for you?
     
    And as it happens, I am quite prepared to accept that global temperatures shift for the simple reason that it is an historic fact that they have done so.  In the south of England there are wild conifer trees because eons ago the ice age and its glaciers pushed conifer seeds south in the glaciers.  Then it warmed up . . .
     
    One of your links mentioned CO2 which, I would remind you, has gone up astronomically over the last 25 years thanks to China, India and the rest – so where is the astronomical rise in temperatures?

  9. 9
    Ron Chusid says:

    And what is the position of the British government? It’s not as if they have abandoned support for the scientific consensus.

    Nobody has predicted that there should be astronomical rises in temperature. Temperatures have been rising slowly as predicted, in many cases with results of this being at the more extreme end of predictions so far.

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