IS THERE ANYTHING MORE IRRITATING on a cold day than the wind throwing knives into your face as you walk outside?
Yes there is, actually.
It’s the people who sneer, “What happened to global warming?!”
They say this as if a single cold day disproves the entire field of climate science.
What these naysayers are of course confusing are the concepts of weather and climate.
While weather is what is happening outside on a particular day, climate is what happens outside over the course of years and decades and centuries.
It is rarely helpful to simply observe the weather on a given day when studying climate.
Instead, scientists observe weather readings over long periods of time and point out trends.
This is not a difficult concept to either grasp or explain, which is why climate scientists must get so frustrated to hear ideologues regurgitate those old tropes about global warming on a cold day.
If one homeless person gets a home in one community, that doesn’t mean there is no nationwide homelessness crisis.
Likewise, if one day is cold in Kamloops, that doesn’t negate the fact that the planet as a whole is warming up.
Today in Kamloops, it is not cold. It is in fact, quite mild, with a temperature well above the normal daytime high.
It has been mild for weeks now, and on December 14, we have barely any snow on the ground.
Just as a few cold days can’t be used to disprove climate change, neither can a few warm days be used to prove it.
The problem with some not believing in climate change, though, is not that people confuse weather and climate.
It’s that there are people who have been convinced to distrust climate science all together, and people who have been convinced that scientists are trying to push a liberal agenda.
If we are to believe climate scientists who say the climate is changing, and suggest human activity might be exacerbating those changes, we might have to change our beliefs and our behaviour.
And that’s hard.
Almost as hard as predicting the weather.
