Get ready for it:
This is the dumbest thing that happened on the Senate floor today
Yep, that’s Sen. James Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, throwing a snowball to prove that global warming isn’t really happening.
“We keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Inhofe said. “So I ask the chair,” — referring to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) — “Do you know what this is? It’s a snowball, from just outside here. So it’s very, very cold out... very unseasonable.” He then lobbed said snowball to a page and lapsed into deep silence, a smile across his face.
Inhofe, by the way, isn’t some random nut off the street. He’s currently chair of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works committee. You want Congress to do something about global warming? For the next two years, at least, any bill would have to go through him.
Now, psychologists and social scientists have found that it can be extremely difficult to debunk false beliefs with mere facts. So a short explanation of why Inhofe is wrong is probably futile. But here it goes:
It can sometimes be colder-than-usual in some parts of the world and warmer-than-usual in others. That’s what’s going on right now: it’s unusually frigid in the Northeastern and Midwest United States, but warmer-than-average elsewhere:
So if you wanted to figure out if global warming was actually happening, you’d need to look at the entire planet, not just the weather in your tiny patch. That’s why scientists focus on charts like the one below — showing that average temperatures are rising over time and that 2014 was likely the warmest year on record — rather than just checking to see if there’s snow in February:
(NOAA)
Meanwhile, scientists are quite sure that the world will keep getting hotter as we add more carbon-dioxide to the atmosphere. But they aren’t really predicting that global warming will abolish snow entirely.
The more dire projections suggest we’ll see a 2°C to 4°C rise in global average temperatures by 2100. That could create a lot of havoc — severe heat waves, sea-level rise, etc. — but it wouldn’t be enough to eliminate winter for good. (If it ever got hot enough that there was no snow or ice left at all, we’d be really screwed.)
What’s more, projections of global warming suggest that parts of the US will still experience record low temperatures now and again — even as the planet gets hotter overall — thanks to natural variability. Those record lows will just become less frequent over time, while record high temperatures will occur more often. That’s exactly what’s been happening in the last few decades:
Anyway, Inhofe has no doubt heard this all many times before and doesn’t really care. You can find more of his riveting views in his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.
Here’s the full video:
