Thanks to a story in the New York Times by Kendra Pierre-Louis, we now have a good analogy for President Trump and all the climate-change deniers who point to any record-setting frigid weather to score points against the science of climate change.
Last night the president tweeted:
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!
Ms. Pierre-Louis gives us a very good analogy to retort to deniers evoking this illogical reasoning:
…weather is how much money you have in your pocket today, whereas climate is your net worth. A billionaire who has forgotten his wallet one day is not poor, any more than a poor person who lands a windfall of several hundred dollars is suddenly rich. What matters is what happens over the long term.
Ms. Pierre-Louis points out that the president is not the first politician to use an extremely cold day to try to disparage the reality of climate change:
Politicians have tried to use cold snaps to prove a point before. Mr. Trump’s line of reasoning recalled a February day in 2015 when Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that the Earth was not warming.
However, this tactic actually dates back to February 2010 when former South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, an unabashed climate-change denier, poked fun at Al Gore with a tweet citing an unusual DC snow storm.
It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries “uncle”
12:46 PM – 9 Feb 2010
Fortunately, there are fewer and fewer politicians in Washington who keep on demonstrating their ignorance on the issue of climate change.
The question is whether these anti-science office holders have already made it too late for us to avoid the consequences of unrestrained carbon pollution.