It’s a common refrain from climate change skeptics — It’s cold out, it’s snowing here, so climate change is a bunch of bunk. This erroneous thinking has been debunked by scientists for decades, but it persists. And now the man with the biggest microphone in America — President Donald Trump — is repeated the same false logic.
“In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes,” the president tweeted on Monday. “What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]? Please come back fast, we need you!”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency the president oversees, responded with a tutorial on the difference between climate and weather. “Winter storms don’t prove that climate warming isn’t happening,” it responded to Trump.
[Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018]
That’s because climate and weather, though related, are not the same thing. Worldwide warming — climate — can make winter storms and cold snaps — local weather — worse.
The New York Times offered this simple explanation: “Climate refers to how the atmosphere acts over a long period of time, while weather describes what’s happening on a much shorter time scale. The climate can be thought of, in a way, as the sum of long periods of weather.
“Or, to use an analogy Mr. Trump might appreciate, 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, anymore than a poor person who lands a windfall of several hundred dollars is suddenly rich. What matters is what happens over the long term.”
And, over the long term, it is clear that the Earth is getting warmer. To illustrate this, the Times cited data from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute. Even with the current extreme cold temperatures in the midwestern United States, the average temperature in North America is warmer than the historical base temperature for Jan. 30, which is set from 1979 to 2000. The worldwide temperature for the day is also above the historical average.
Meanwhile, temperatures in Australia have exceeded 120 degree Fahrenheit, surpassing historical records.
Warming, especially in the Arctic, it turns out, is responsible for the current cold snap in the midwest, as well as the one there in 2014. Jacquelyn Gill, an assistant professor of paleoecology at the UMaine Climate Change Institute, explains why.
“The Arctic is warming faster than any other area on the planet, which is reducing the differences — or, the gradient — in temperature between the North Pole and more temperate latitudes, like here in Maine. As the gradient weakens — Arctic and lower-latitude temperatures become more similar as the Arctic warms — the jet stream gets weaker. It can get ‘stuck’ in a wavy position for days or weeks, pulling cold Arctic air down” to places like Michigan and Illinois.
“So [scientists] think these extreme cold events (weather) have a connection to the long-term warming (climate),” she wrote in an email to the BDN.
Here’s what we need to be focusing on: Thirteen agencies within the Trump administration warned recently that climate change will have devastating consequences on the U.S. and the world.
The report’s message is simple: Climate change is real and it poses a serious threat to Americans’ health, finances and general well-being. The hurricanes and wildfires that are increasingly killing and displacing Americans will become more frequent and intense. Water shortages and heat waves, especially those that plague the western United States, will become more acute, causing crop failures and human deaths.
[Antarctica is losing ice 6 times faster today than in 1980s]
The report came on the heels of an analysis that warned that global leaders had only 12 years to dramatically cut carbon emissions or risk catastrophic, irreversible changes to the planet.
Without significant reductions in carbon emissions, from transportation, energy generation, manufacturing other sources, the planet will continue to warm. There will continue to be frigid cold snaps and major snow storms, but that doesn’t mitigate the coming disaster that can only be addressed through significant policy changes.