All kinds of people and organizations, from media to scientists, have been pushing back against the idea, popular among the Rush Limbaugh set, that recent bitingly cold weather disproves global warming. Rather, they say, global warming actually causes this extreme weather, by making the polar air mass more unstable. That’s now the official line of the White House, which is embarking on a bit of a media blitz to deny the notion that one cold snap means climate change is a lie. In a video released Wednesday, President Obama’s science and technology advisor, Dr. John Holdren, made the two-minute case.
“The fact is that no single weather episode can either prove or disprove global climate change. Climate is the pattern of weather that we observe geographically, and over the seasons, and it’s described in terms of averages, variations, and probabilities,” Holdren soberly explained. To further make the point, according to BuzzFeed, the White House plans to dedicate one of its “We the Geeks” sessions to the polar vortex, throwing a team of scientists and experts at the issue, presumably to offer well-reasoned, scientific explanations.
But well-reasoned scientific explanations can only do so much in the face of conspiracy theories and insinuation. “In the middle of a hoax, they’re perpetrating a hoax, but they’re relying on their total dominance of the media to lie to you each and every day about climate change and global warming,” Limbaugh said on Monday. Beat that, science.
