The media response to Trump’s recent tweet regarding how he thinks the record cold outbreak this week (more details here) disproves the phenomenon known as global warming can only be described as “huge.” All joking aside, I did manage to find a hidden bit of useful knowledge (likely unintended) in what is otherwise an insult to all who study or care about the world’s climate.
Before I delve into that, I will summarize and rebuke the fallacies contained in his tweet. Essentially, he is claiming that the notion that the global climate is warming due to human activity is false all because it is dangerously cold in the Northern Plains. To be frank, this is untrue. There is overwhelming scientific evidence and expert agreement that the Earth is warming as a whole, and we’re all to blame.
So what did the President technically get right?
It’s all in his terminology. The term ‘Global Warming’ is misleading to begin with, as it implies the entire globe is warming uniformly. By this definition, I will agree with President Trump that global warming isn’t true. That said, he probably won’t agree (at least publicly) with me when I say that what he meant to say was ‘Climate Change,’ and that this is most certainly occurring. The manifestation of climate change is in anomalies- departures from average conditions- which are not hard to find when looking at temperature maps of the Earth’s surface.
What the President refuses to see is that other regions of the planet are experiencing unusually warm conditions at the same time as this arctic outbreak in the US. And the kicker is that the warm anomalies are much more expansive than cold anomalies, validating the concept of climate change on a global scale.
Trump (and unfortunately, many others) have subscribed to the scientifically irresponsible thought that “It’s cold where I am, so there’s no way the whole world can be getting warmer.” This is not how the Earth system works. For one place to be anomalously cold, another area must (usually) be anomalously warm, which is what has occurred over the high arctic, namely Alaska which, curiously, is an all-too-ignored part of the US, despite seeing some of the most anomalously warm conditions in the world in recent years.
It may be an accidental technicality, but you have to give credit where credit’s due, right?
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