Not that readers of this blog need to be reminded of this, but some of our friends might (if you have friends like Donald Trump)…
Generalizing about global climate change from a cold snap is like predicting who will win the world series based on a single ball or strike in pre-season. The two things are about the same thing — temperature, baseball — but there’s little real connection between them beyond that.
This Washington Post article from the last U.S. “polar vortex” is helpful in putting things into perspective.
There is this theory about how the polar vortex is directly connected to global warming. But it’s a new theory that still needs testing, verification, debate, and all those other things that scientists do before they’re supposed to say anything.
What I would like to do is add a global mean temperature monitor on this web page — something that tells you the absolute average temperature on this planet’s surface (averaged out from as many monitoring sites around the world as statisticians insist on) at any given time — and then add a comparative measure of the average global temperature for that day since we began keeping those records. Anyone know if that is possible?
It would be a pretty useless figure, for experiential purposes (since that temperature doesn’t necessarily exist anywhere on the planet). But useful rhetorically.
