Along with death and taxes, if I can count on the certaintude of anything it would be that unusually cold weather will bring out snarky comments from my global-warming-skeptic friends—like the one that appeared today within minutes of my posting a Facebook status update hoping for snow this week.
So I’m passing along a great post from The Vine blog about the difference between climate and weather. It can be a tedious waste of energy to try to explain the concept to someone who doesn’t really care to understand, but the following graphic does a nice job of quickly and clearly putting this cold snap into perspective:
Sure we still have record lows (and will continue to have them). And we’ll continue to have more record highs. That’s called weather. The trend in the relative ratios, that’s called climate.
Another item from the blogosphere today . . . I was interested in seeing this post—Why Believe in Manmade Climate Change?—on science writer David Appell’s blog Quark Soup, the first of what he plans as a regular series of interviews with actual scientists on the subject. I was most intrigued to see him ask a variation of the question I posed here not too long ago: What would make you change your mind? It will be interesting to hear how scientists answer that one, what evidence and metrics they would look for.
