The Senate, a Screwball and a Climate Change Skeptic

The NBC News website posted an article, today, titled, "The Senate, a Snowball and a Climate Change Skeptic".  But I like my title better.

The article features a photograph of Senator James Inhofe, on the Senate floor, holding a snowball and carrying on about how it demonstrates that there's no such thing as global warming. He claims that the record cold being experienced in our northern and eastern states proves that there's no global warming.

Let's just put that into perspective.

The idea of global warming is that the globally and annually averaged surface temperature is rising. To find out whether this is happening, we would need to get the globally averaged temperature for the entire planet, for every year over a span of time. This has, in fact, been done. Following is the famous "hockey stick" graph from the work of Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes. Though a great many climate change deniers have complained loud and long that this picture cannot possibly be correct, the analysis has been performed several times, by different researchers using different methodologies, and all have produced roughly similar pictures: Since the beginning of the industrial age, when we started pouring gigatons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, globally averaged surface temperature has been rising.

Some of the research that has verified this picture was led by Dr. Richard Muller, a physics professor and sometime global warming skeptic, who assembled a team to exhaustively examine every shred of data that had led climate scientists, including Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, to the conclusion that the climate is warming. He even accepted research funding from the Koch brothers, who are famous for denying the reality of global warming. Nevertheless, his team verified that this picture is accurate.  On average, the planet is heating up, and this warming is caused by the greenhouse gases that we are adding to the atmosphere.

But Senator Inhofe can't accept this, because, in one spot on the surface of the earth, in one month of the year, it's unseasonably cold. He appears to honestly believe that, because it's colder than normal in one place at one time, it is impossible that the average might be increasing.

If he really believes that, then I suspect he doesn't get the joke when Garrison Keillor reports "the news from Lake Wobegon, where ... all the children are above average."