First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody is like—a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, see, look at that, there's all this snow on the ground, this doesn't mean anything. I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn't mean that every place is getting warmer; it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees, and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow.
The idea is, is that as the planet as a whole gets warmer, you start seeing changing weather patterns, and that creates more violent storm systems, more unpredictable weather. So any single place might end up being warmer; another place might end up being a little bit cooler; there might end up being more precipitation in the air, more monsoons, more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more drought in some places, floods in other places.
So I just—that's one aspect of the science that I think everybody should understand.
Text and video (in which a high school principal improbably gets the heartiest round of applause).
Doubts about the climate change consensus extend far beyond some comical anecdotes about the weather. Ron Bailey explains why both credible and unreliable global warming claims have taken on a bad odor lately in "Climate Crackup," his cover story from the March issue of Reason.
