Stupidest, most ignorant headline of the day (global warming edition)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From Bloomberg:

Blizzard Dumps Snow on Copenhagen as Leaders Battle Warming

This sort of misleading reporting, with an implication that global warming isn't real because of freakish weather, drives me crazy.

Let's get this straight: Climate is not the same thing as weather. A blizzard in Copenhagen, however strange or, here, ironic, doesn't say anything about the global climate, or about rising global temperatures.

Besides, as I have put it here before (e.g., here and here), global warming, which is indisputable (the facts are the facts), melts sea ice. When sea ice melts, the seas rise, and there are potentially dramatic changes to the earth's hydrologic cycle, including to the so-called Ocean Conveyor, which regulates the Gulf Stream, the flow of warm water up into the North Atlantic. If the Conveyor slows down significantly as a result of more and more fresh water coming down from the north (melted sea ice), temperatures would cool significantly in Europe and elsewhere in the region, and, more dramatically, much of the Northern Hemisphere could be plunged back into another ice age. (Researchers have already discovered remarkable changes in oceanic salinity levels.)

In other words, global warming could lead to cooling in places like Denmark.

That's not too hard to understand, is it? Well, it clearly is to the fucking morons who write headlines like this, not to mention to the global warming denialists who continue to live with their heads firmly up their asses and, with some of them, to lie about the most pressing crisis of our time.