Jubbergun wrote:
No, what constitutes an incredible amount of dumb is not realizing that those who are always going about global warming will say that global warming is the cause of weather/climate events regardless of what the weather/climate event is. There's no consistency. If it's cold all winter and snows (shocker), it's because of global warming, but if it's warm, that's also because of global warming. Then when you ask why, if things are working the way these people seem to think, they can't make a solid prediction in one direction (hot or cold), they yell, "SCIENCE!!" the same way some people yell "God!" as if that magically explains why they have no idea what the fuck they're saying. Every society has some sort of doomsday/end-of-time mythology, our's is just seems a little more advanced than Ragnarok or Revelation.
The dumb thing is thinking that a system as complex as the climate is going to yield simple "hotter or colder" answers. Denver is about a mile higher than New York, but if you drive from New York to Denver you aren't going to be driving up a smooth slope the whole way - there will be small hills, valleys, and flat areas along the way. It's the same with climate - the overall direction is up, but there will be cooler and hotter years along the way. Add in geographical variation and the complex effects of temperature on things like wind and precipitation, and it should be clear that there aren't going to be simple answers for the details, even if the overall trend line is clear. And nobody who's informed about global warming and is speaking carefully will attribute any given weather event to global warming. We know that global warming increases the probability of extreme events, and that periods of cooling are not inconsistent with predictions, but saying a certain storm or w/e is caused by global warming is never accurate.