Not too long ago, during an unusually cool spring in 2020, I posted something on Facebook about how unusually cool it had been at the time. It was not meant to be a political post, honest. Yet, there was a guy – a former high school classmate and proud Trump supporter and science denier – who decided to take that opportunity, if you will, to throw shade on the whole “global warming theory.”
He lived in Florida, and it was unusually cool in Florida at the time. Of course, he felt hat this disproved global warming.
And so I uncharacteristically went off on him a bit. Mostly, it was frustration at this kind of thinking, with people who clearly do not make the effort to even try to understand the things that they criticize even a little bit. Maybe he listens to any number of prominent conservative radio talk shows, or FOX News, or perhaps some conspiracy theory videos on Youtube. Maybe he even did some research on the internet.
One way or the other, he felt himself up to the task of challenging scientific expertise, based on how it was cooler than usual in Florida lately at that time. So he made those arguments, and felt that he had his checkmate point, because obviously, there was no other explanation for cooler than normal temperatures in Florida than that global warming was merely some Chinese hoax, and not real at all.
Right. So I told him what anyone who actually respects science enough to believe in it would tell him. If he bothered to try and understand it, he would have learned that “global warming” was a deceptive name, and that climate change is probably more accurate. Scientists had long suggested that the climate would grow more extreme, and not merely hotter and hotter, all of the time. We would see more storms than ever before, and they would be more severe. And indeed, we had seen some unbelievable storms, supposedly once in a century storms that seem to happen nowadays once every few years, from Katrina to Sandy to Harvey, and those are just three, and restricted to the Caribbean and the United States.
Also, I told him that it seemed strange that he noticed how his Florida community being a bit cooler proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that global warming was a hoax, yet he seemed not to have noticed record hot temperatures in places all around the world in 2017, which had been passed by new records in many of those same areas in 2019.
Surely, science skeptics are also not paying attention to the weather around North America recently, either. Because in the northwest, temperatures are exceedingly hot, and not just breaking records, but shattering them. In Portland, Oregon, on Monday, it reached 116 degrees, following a weekend where it had been 108 on Saturday and 112 on Sunday. Prior to this year, the record heat in Portland had been 107.
Seattle also has seen incredibly hot temperatures, as it reached 108 degrees on Monday. It was 112 in Spokane.
Some places were even hotter, incredibly. In Lytton, British Columbia, Canada – not a place normally known for very hot temperatures – it reached a sizzling 118.2, easily a record for that community. We are in the middle of a heat wave in northern New Jersey, as well. Yesterday was hot and muggy and miserable, one of those days where you almost break out in sweat as soon as you open the door, and feel that overly hot air all over, giving you that uncomfortable embrace. But I still feel bad for those people in the Pacific Northwest right now.
And I also wish that people like my old high school classmate would actually pay attention to these kinds of trends, with new record hot temperatures seemingly being established every year in various corners of the world, again with an alarming regularity as the years pass, not to mention the severity of storms when they come, instead of simply sitting back on a cool spring day and taking that as confirmation that global warming is a Chinese hoax.
Damn, those Chinese sure made this hoax convincing, didn’t they?
Portland, Seattle and Canada crush all-time heat records for second straight day by Jason Samenow and Ian Livingston, June 28, 2021:
Portland and Seattle hit all-time highs of 116 and 108 Monday, while a town in Canada surged to a national record of 118.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/06/27/heat-records-pacific-northwest/
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