by kevindooley
FoxNews’ Neil Cavuto still thinks winter chill disproves global warming; actual scientists disagree:
[Via Climate Progress]
Last week I went on FoxNews so Neil Cavuto could diss global warming because it was cold outside. Shockingly, I failed to persuade him that no one ever said global warming would turn January into July — though at least he seems to have internalized my message as the “Duh!” part of his opening in the above compilation. Think Progress has the whole, sad story in this repost:
In recent days, conservatives have seized on the cold snap gripping the southeast region of the country to cast doubt on global warming. “Hey Al Gore: we want our global warming, and we want it now,” said Newsbusters’ Mark Finkelstein. In his newsletter today, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wondered about “Al Gore’s explanation for this miserable, persistent chill,” and the National Review’s Mona Charen claimed that the “cold snap has spurred the ‘warmists’ to spin control.”
For the past week, Fox News host Neil Cavuto has been giving a daily “Fox News global warming alert,” which consists of him telling viewers how cold it is. “It is still cold,” Cavuto said yesterday, adding that it’s “not your recent garden variety global warming.” “It’s freezing across the entire globe,” Cavuto shouted on Saturday. Former Nixon speechwriter and actor Ben Stein responded, “Maybe somebody in the government will wake up and say, ‘Hey, it’s colder. It’s not hotter.’ Maybe all this talk about global warming needs to be rethought.”
[More]
Really? The entire globe? Washington state has been warmer this month than normal. So has Alaska. So has Greenland.
Anyone who actually takes what these guys say with any grain of salt is simply allowing misinformation and lies to color their judgement. Why would any rational person interested in what is really going on listen to anything said by Neil Cavuto? It is so easy to show that he is not telling the truth.
Here is a nice figure, looking at record highs and record lows, from UCAR:
This is a useful figure, even though it looks at just the US, because it demonstrates exactly the trend one would expect to see with global warming. Over a long period of time, the trends seen can be very educational. I would expect that similar figures for Europe or Asia would be much the same.
While the ratio of record highs to record lows used to be about 1:1 or less, the last 3 decades have seen the ratio increase. In the last decade, there were twice as many record highs as record lows.
In fact, most of this is coming from warmer nights than we had seen 50 years ago. A few days of cold weather will not destroy this trend. According to the models, by 2050, the ratio could be 50:1. Here is a key quote:
Despite the increasing number of record highs, there will still be occasional periods of record cold, Meehl notes.
“One of the messages of this study is that you still get cold days,” Meehl says. “Winter still comes. Even in a much warmer climate, we’re setting record low minimum temperatures on a few days each year. But the odds are shifting so there’s a much better chance of daily record highs instead of lows.”
The point from this figure is not that it ‘proves’ climate change. It is that having a few days of cold daytime weather does not negate many, many days of warmer nights.
No matter what Neil Cavuto says. But then, his job is apparently not to actually inform anybody of the facts.
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