Climate alarmists, though dismissing skeptics as anti-science, consistently cherry pick evidence to promote their ideology. They highlight Hurricane Sandy, but dismiss the massive cold front striking America as an anomaly.
Severe Arctic cold is spreading throughout the United States, creating “epic” amounts of snow. Alarmists at the lefty environmental site Climate Central dismiss this incredible cold as an exception to warming trends, ignoring recent evidence that indicates a warming has stalled. Instead, the cold provides another example linking global warming to natural variability rather than human activity.
The continental United States is facing a “cold outbreak that is one of the most severe to occur in early December in several years, possibly since the late 1990s,” according to climate alarmist Andrew Freedman from Climate Central.
He then attempted to explain away this massive chill as a “rare exception” to global warming, saying “there will still be cold snaps and heat waves even in a warming world.”
Snow fall has far exceeded expectations throughout the Rocky Mountains and the Mid-West. Moreover, normally warm Californian farmers have been working to protect their crops from this cold spell, and freezing rains are extending as far south as Arkansas and Oklahoma.
But that’s not the story the folks at Climate Central want to tell. The site describes its “mission” as “Communicate the science and effects of climate change to the public and decision-makers.” Communicating the science, in this case, means downplaying a late fall freeze hitting 27 states and dropping temperatures 50 degrees or more in a day.
It is easy to imagine Climate Central having a different reaction to a late spring heat wave where temperatures rose 50 degrees in a day.
But the group was certainly cool to the freeze. Freedman follows the alarmist tendency to dismiss contrary evidence as exceptions while exaggerating the importance of anomalous weather occurrences.
For example, Freedman tried to exploit Hurricane Sandy as evidence for climate change, calling it a “likely accomplice in the crime,” but dismissed the inactive 2013 hurricane season as anomalous and “surprising given some of the favorable conditions that exist.”
Alarmists would do better to see how the freeze fits into the recent slowdown of global warming. Even the New York Times reported in June that warming trends have slowed down substantially since 1998.
The change from a 1990s warming trend to a possible cooling trend is explained by research into the natural variability of the climate over time. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an organization dedicated to promoting climate rationalism, has observed alternating periods of warming and cooling throughout recorded history.
These alternations reflect natural climate variability which suggests that “natural variability is responsible for late twentieth century warming and the cessation of warming since 1998.” In fact, a previous cooling period, observed in the 1970s, led to hysteria over the possibility of “another ice age.”
This current slowdown helps explain why, for example, Antarctic sea ice levels reached record highs in 2012 and again in 2013.
