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Archived Rebuttal
This is the archived Basic rebuttal to the climate myth "It's freaking cold!". Click here to view the latest rebuttal.
What the science says...
| A local cold day has nothing to do with the long-term trend of increasing global temperatures. |
It's easy to confuse current weather events with long-term climate trends, and hard to understand the difference between weather and climate. It's a bit like being at the beach, trying to figure out if the tide is rising or falling just by watching individual waves roll in and out. The slow change of the tide is masked by the constant churning of the waves.
In a similar way, the normal ups and downs of weather make it hard to see slow changes in climate. To find climate trends you need to look at how weather is changing over a longer time span. Looking at high and low temperature data from recent decades shows that new record highs occur nearly twice as often as new record lows.
New records for cold weather will continue to be set, but global warming's gradual influence will make them increasingly rare.
Updated on 2010-08-22 by Jim Meador.
THE ESCALATOR
(free to republish)