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Continue to Remind the Alarmists that It's Cold Out. They Deserve It

Global warming. (AP)
January 7, 2014

One of my smaller pleasures in life is joking during winter that, by now, I was promised flying cars and global warming. If you haven't noticed, it's really cold out! Where's all this global warming that was supposed to deliver us from 7 degree weather? We've been bamboozled. Etc.

Whenever one makes a joke like this, the super serial types get super serial, put their scolding hats on, and start shaking their fingers. "Don't do that! Just because it's cold out, that doesn't mean global warming isn't real! The temps are going up! Dogs and cats, living together! Sputter sputter sputter!" See, for instance, this. Or this far less literate take (BOROWITZ WARNING). And that's why these jokes are so fun to make. The global warming alarmists are the easiest people to troll in the entire world. You don't even have to make a particularly good or original joke to set them off. Just say "Man, this cold weather sure does disprove global warming," sit back, and watch the fireworks.

This is an especially amusing tactic since, without fail, every single global warming alarmist (and, thus, every single media outlet) screams GLOBAL WARMING at the top of their lungs at every adverse weather event that doesn't involve simple cold. A tornado touches down on top of a school? GLOBAL WARMING. (Never you mind that the total number of tornadoes hit record lows in 2013.) A hurricane demolishes New Orleans? GLOBAL WARMING. (Ignore that the hurricane in question was a mere category 3 when it made landfall and the city's levees had been weakened by decades of incompetent management. Also ignore that the total number of hurricanes is way down.) Heat wave? GLOBAL WARMING. (Because before 1990 there was never a heat wave, ever.) Snowstorms? GLOBAL WARMING. (No. Seriously.) I assume someone somewhere is arguing that the polar vortex making everything really cold also proves that global warming is real. I don't have the strength to Google it.

One can believe that man is contributing to global warming (as I do,* and as other alarmism skeptics, such as MIT's Richard Lindzen, do) and still find it brutally hilarious that every single weather event for the last 20 years has been blamed on global warming, as if "climate" was a thing that got invented sometime in the mid-1980s and before that it was just, like, 70 degrees and sunny all the time, everywhere, for all of recorded human history. When faced with such absurdity, the only response is more absurdity.

So I'll make you super serial climate alarmists a deal: I'll stop cracking the joke about it being cold in January when you stop freaking out every time there's a tornado in the midwest or a hurricane in the Atlantic or 100-degree weather in August. Deal?

*Seriously, though: It's time to really examine the upsides of global warming. Because you know what's not going to stop any time soon? The release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

Published under: Climate Change