Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 06:06:23 -0500
From: cabe
Subject: Cancelled climate change meeting snarkiness
The snarky comments from Paul Revere, Tom West, and Brian Bock about the cancellation of the climate change committee strongly suggest their need for an introductory meteorology course, or maybe just a dictionary. They appear to have fallen victim to the fundamental, though quite common, error of confusing climate and weather. Climate is long term and geographically widespread; weather is short term and relatively geographically restricted.
The implicit suggestion in those comments, to the effect that climate change is somehow refuted by any given weather event, is like suggesting that education is failing, because a student got a bad test grade. Or that medical care does not work, because someone got sick. Or that highways are falling apart, because there is a pothole on my street. Or that the economy is headed for a depression, because the stock market declined yesterday. Or that government is corrupt, because an elected official got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. It takes no great imagination to come up with lots more examples, of varying degrees of silliness. Superstition lies not far down that road.
There used to be a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who was famous for drawing particular curves through two points. The joke, for the uninitiated, is that any curve whatsoever can be drawn through two points. The logical error is arguing from a specific incident to a general principle, or generalizing to a broad conclusion from an anecdote. One weather event does not imply anything whatsoever at all about climate. Better evidence that climate change is occurring is the recent data that average global temperatures went up again last year, not that there were some cold days or cold areas.
Pat Cabe