Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Associated Press:

TRUMP: “In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming (sic)? Please come back fast, we need you!”

THE FACTS: While the Midwest is in the grip of a chill that’s likely to set records, Earth is still considerably warmer than it was 30 years ago and especially 100 years ago.

The lower 48 states make up only 1.6 percent of the globe and five western states are warmer than normal. The Earth as a whole — and it is global warming, not U.S. warming — on Tuesday is 0.54 degrees (0.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average and 1.6 degrees warmer than it was on average about 100 years ago, according to data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer and NASA.

“This is simply an extreme weather event and not representative of global scale temperature trends,” said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini, who is in the midst of some of the worst subfreezing cold. “The exact opposite is happening in Australia right now.”

Australia is broiling with triple-digit heat that is setting records opposite the Midwest. Adelaide last week was 115.9 degrees (46.6 Celsius), setting the record for the highest temperature ever set by a major Australian city.

Trump is cherry picking cold weather to ignore the larger picture of a warming planet, said John Cook, a professor of climate change communications at George Mason University.

“This myth is like arguing that nighttime proves the sun doesn’t exist,” Cook said.

Washington Post:

In Wisconsin, the governor has declared a state of emergency, and many school districts called off classes ahead of a bone-chilling week of weather. The looming deep freeze led to federal court closures in Chicago and shut down the Lincoln Park Zoo — though polar bears will still be allowed outside. Flights were grounded. Amtrak canceled trains running in parts of the Midwest. Utility companies scrambled 24-hour response teams, because as one executive told The Post, “In these kinds of events, people just cannot be out of power.”

As millions of people across the nation braced for a possibly life-threatening cold snap, President Trump late Monday used the opportunity to mock the idea that climate change is actually happening, while misspelling the word “warming.”

“In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder,” Trump tweeted. “People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!”

“Even in a warming climate, you still expect to get extreme and sometimes record lows occurring — they’ll just be occurring less frequently,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, noting that recent years have brought many more record highs than record lows.

“As far as the president’s remark, I’m not sure exactly what to make of it,” he said. “But I think in this case Trump’s signaling to his base that he doesn’t take climate change seriously.”

Indeed, in this particular case, counterintuitive as it may sound, some scientists say the so-called “polar vortex” descending over the Midwest and Great Lakes Region is the kind of event we should expect more of as the Arctic gets severely disrupted by climate change.

Granted, that’s far from an established point of view. Other researchers continue to demur about a winter weather event that could be historic in the cold it brings to some regions.

“I think this a really interesting, open question that is very much on the cutting edge of climate science,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

For nearly a decade, there have been scientific contentions that the rapid melting of the Arctic, which is happening much faster than the warming of more temperate latitudes, is interfering with weather, especially in winter.

These contentions have drawn a lot of attention. The Obama administration, for instance, put out a 2-minute video explaining the 2014 polar vortex, taking pains to say that frigid weather doesn’t mean the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t warming. “If you’ve been hearing that extreme cold spells like the one we’re having in the United States now disprove global warming, don’t believe it,” John Holdren, Obama’s top science adviser, said at the time. “The fact is that no single weather episode can either prove or disprove global climate change.”