No Summer, No Fall

A few things in life are better than sitting in an oceanside Caribbean bar, drinking rum punch and listening to a local band play Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” but I can’t offhand remember what they are. Here in Minnesota, though, we are far removed from Jamaica sunsets. We didn’t have much of a summer, and now we aren’t having much of an autumn. You could rewrite the lyrics of Marley’s song as “No Summer, No Fall:”

High temperature averaged a chilly 47 degrees for the first two weeks of the month – 16 degrees below normal.
With 19 consecutive days of below normal temperatures and accumulating snow falling a few weeks before normal, news that this has been the coldest start to an October on record in the Twin Cities probably isn’t all that shocking.
On Friday, the National Weather Service confirmed that there has never been a colder first two weeks of the month ever. …
Typically the average high temperature for the Twin Cities from Oct. 1-14 is 63 degrees but this year the average high temperature was only 47 degrees, or 16 degrees below average. That breaks the old mark of 52 degrees set back in 1875.

It is quite remarkable that liberals continue to sell their global warming/government takeover program, when any damn fool can see that the globe isn’t warming.
UPDATE: We got a nice email from a climate scientist who objected to drawing inferences about global climate from temperatures at any given place and said that the Earth is actually still warming. I believe what he meant by that observation is that the Earth continues to warm up from the Little Ice Age (thank goodness), which is why glaciers continue to shrink, etc. What is significant, though, is that there has been no net global warming for the last decade–I believe that represents a scientific consensus–and that time period is long enough to constitute a statistical refutation of the AGW models. (Some important work on this point has been done very recently.)
He’s right, of course, that you can’t draw conclusions about climate from whether it happens to be warm or cold at any particular time and place. I think most people understand that. Yet the alarmists draw such inferences all the time–every time a polar bear goes for a ride on an ice floe it’s evidence of anthropogenic global warming. That’s why we’ve written lots of posts on the science of global warming and put up plenty of charts and graphs. See, for example, here and here.
But the reality is that the global cooling scare of the 1970s was plausible to people mostly because that happened to be a cold period, and the global warming scare of the 1980s and 1990s was plausible to people mostly because that happened to be a warmer period. Today, a plurality of Americans tell pollsters that they don’t think climate change is driven primarily by human activity. They’re right, but I don’t think that emerging consensus is driven by millions of people studying scientific articles. I think it’s mostly because collective experience and observation are causing people to realize that the climate is not obeying the computer models. So anecdotal experience is useful when it causes people to question the fake “consensus” on global warming that the Left is trying to foist on us. Better yet if some of those who question go on to read scientific articles.
My “any damn fool” comment was of course provocative and not literally correct. No one, however perceptive, would be able to draw conclusions about the Earth’s climate from his own observations. Stated more accurately and less provocatively, I would say that any damn fool who looks into the subject and educates himself on the science will be able to figure out that the anthropogenic global warming theory is incorrect.

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