On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, James Heartfield wrote:
> Still, I don't remember anyone saying that it was daft to attribute the
> Paris heatwave or the Australian outback fires to global warming. The
> distinction between 'weather' and 'climate' seemed to get a bit lost
> then, too.
There are dummies on every side, James, granted. But the two positions are not entirely rhetorical equivalent.
It always silly claim to unusual local heat or coldness as evidence that the globe is getting warmer or cooler. That indeed is mistaking weather for climate.
But it's not silly to say that increasingly weird spates of local weather is what you would expect from global climate change. It is. Change means exactly that, change. If it's going on, "unprecedented" should increasingly become the norm at the local level.
Such local and anecdotal evidence certainly doesn't prove anything. And I'll certainly grant that we the public may simply be noticing and emphasizing weird weather events around the globe more because we have a story they fit into. But there is no climate/weather contradiction between the evidence and the hypothesis.
There is, however, such a weather/climate contradiction in claiming unprecedented coldness as an argument against climate change. If the climate isn't changing, then we shouldn't be getting unprecedented weirdness.
Such a local event of course doesn't disprove that the climate is stable. But it is logically incoherent to cite weird rare events as evidence that the climate isn't changing.
Michael