President Donald Trump has infuriated the canonical left by gleefully tweeting that maybe icy cold New York might benefit a bit from a bit of good old global warming. Climate pundits and know-it-alls have been standing in line to explain how uninformed the leader of the free world is on basic climate science.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are giggling along with Trump who once again has succeeded in getting the mainstream media to run his bidding.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/946531657229701120
Semantics?
The thrust of the critique against Trump is that he doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate. One cold winter does not make a climate. Say the very same people who have been using every drought, every wildfire, every flood, every hurricane, every calving iceberg in Antarctica as evidence for climate change.
For decades, climate skeptics have been tirelessly touting the message that weather is not the same as climate, and the media has ignored it and pushed their catastrophe narrative instead. Now, with one tweet, Trump has been able to get the media to report what skeptics have been saying all along. That’s what you call a brilliant marketing strategy.
Trump, of course, knows perfectly well the difference between the weather and climate. He also knows that disaster prophets have been allowed to spread their messages of doom with no criticism or intellectual resistance from the media.
Gore Again
For instance, he knows that Al Gore predicted that the North Pole would be completely ice-free during summer by 2013. He probably also knows that in 2005 climate scientists predicted that there would be no winter by 2105. According to National Geographic News, quoting atmospheric scientist Noah Diffenbaugh:
“Winter weather could be affected as well, Diffenbaugh said. "You're looking at the coldest couple of weeks of the year not existing anymore in alot of places," he said.
"Certainly winter as we know it likely will disappear in the Northeast."
Yes, that is the same Northeast that is now experiencing a scathing deep freeze, in case you were wondering. That prediction could still come true, but as Trump laconically noted in his tweet, it doesn’t seem very convincing at this point.
Trump also alluded to another fact that is rarely if ever reported by the mainstream media, namely the fact that cold is the real killer, not heat. In fact, according to Science Daily, cold kills 20 times more people than hot weather. In Britain for instance, 44,000 excess deaths were recorded during the exceptionally cold winter of 2015. Many were elderly people who couldn’t afford to heat their homes due to soaring energy bills.
Now thanks to Trump’s humorous tweet, the media is inadvertently bringing people’s attention to the inconvenient facts about the failed predictions of catastrophic climate change. In good spirit, we propose that his next tweet on global warming should be:
“Scientists are now warning that the climate may spread to other countries, maybe even globally.”
