It’s another great day in science. Marshall Shepherd, once a meteorologist at NASA GISS, warns us that a cold snap will destroy reading skills. Don’t let the kids out!
A Cold Start To Thanksgiving Week Will Spawn Climate Change Illiteracy
Marshall Shepherd, Senior Contributor, Forbes
Luckily this only happens in Thanksgiving week, eh?
As the climate cycles turn to cooler trends, expect to see a lot more of this kind of bizarre conjecture and weapons grade excuses. There’s a flock of believers to guard from reality.
Shepherd seems to be trying to preempt and inoculate believers who might get exposed to skeptical comments at Thanksgiving dinner when they meet all those relatives:
Like clockwork, I will also start to see Tweets and Facebook posts claiming that global warming or climate change is not real because its cold. These types of Tweets belong in the Hall of Fame (or Shame) of Climate Illiteracy.
So now believers are primed to gasp or snigger at the right moment round the dinner table. Marshall goes on with a longwinded explanation of how it’s cold now because a rock hit the Earth when it was a baby-world and made winter. He even links to a childrens page at NASA — possibly because most believers are child-like, or he thinks they are not too smart.
Then he winds up to the clincher moment of social shame:
“Friends don’t let friends draw conclusions about climate
based on one day or week”
Of course they don’t. And if Marshall Shepard was my friend I’d ask him when he last wrote to the journalists and politicians who keep saying that the hottest day ever means something about climate change? Isn’t he concerned that the constant junk science reporting about short hot trends only fuels this feeling that short cold trends are valid too?
So if anyone leans on you, ask them which friends of theirs they have they saved from humiliation and ignominy. Or did they let them make unscientific pronouncements that one hot week, day, night, or long weekend was “caused by a coal plant”? Friends don’t let friends embarrass themselves, after all.
And if he wants to talk long trends, let’s talk long trends. The Earth has been cooling for 2,000 years. It’s cooler than it was 7,000 years ago, 120,ooo years ago, and 120 million years ago.
7,000 years of cooling in Greenland.
Greenland is not the whole world. But Antarctica has been cooling for 2,000 years too. And pretty much everyone agrees we’ve had 50 million years of cooling.
Friends don’t let friends worry about minor changes in an ever changing climate.
PS: Our British Friends don’t have thanksgiving, but spare a thought for them. Minus 17 is being mooted, and a newspaper has even used the phrase “a potential mini ice age winter”.