an anecdotal example of denialist logic

As happens every year Weird Things has been up and running, winter inevitably sees an increase in search queries for why it’s cold outside if the world is warming up. I know, it’s only natural to wonder that because if your read what the scientists have to say about global warming, i.e. that it’s going to raise the average global temperatures by several degrees over the course of the next 90 to 100 years, it’s only logical to assume that the world should be on fire and your backyard should turn into a barren, lifeless desert in which small living creatures spontaneously combust from the blazing heat, just like they do in cartoons. All right, so it’s actually more of the impression you get when you listen to overly zealous environmentalists talk about how a global warming monster will come to your house and skin you alive unless you cut your carbon footprint this instant, but this train of thought leads to a constant stream of gems like this one being left in my annual posts on the subject of why it’s cold in winter and why it will still be cold even when the warming runs its course…

I’m a global warming denialist. Although denialist is not a word. As I sit here looking out [of] my window it is 5:00 in the afternoon. The temperature is 9 degrees. Snow has piled up around my window and it looks like I’ll be shoveling again. Glaciers will melt and re-freeze the snow will pile up around my window every year and it will be 9 degrees in February [again]. People will continue to shovel snow and [will] eventually forbid politicians to waste money on this frivolous exercise in pseudo science. People like me do not believe in the science of Global Warming because there is no science. You are a fool. I’m a global warming denialist. Although denialist is not a word.

So in other words, because it’s really cold outside for this commenter the day he left the comment and it just so happened to snow, this must mean that his backyard is an accurate microcosm of the entire planet and it is absolutely freezing rather than warming up. It’s not like, oh say, Sydney, Australia enjoyed a nice 74 °F day while our frozen commenter was thawing himself out. Wait a second. That’s exactly what happened. It’s as if there were different climate belts around the world, possibly related to the latitudes and the angle of the light from the Sun hitting the planet, and if we want to know the typical temperature of the Earth, we would need to average it. And while that average creeps up, all those different climate belts are still more or less maintained and go through their more or less typical cycles with slow and subtle changes. But you know, since our poor, snow-shoveling commenter’s city is cold in the winter time (and that city might be in the tundra as far as we’ll know from this vague anecdote), it must mean that the entire science behind climatology is wrong and some half a century of research into the greenhouse effect must be discarded. And that’s denialist logic for you…