[vivekd]

Hold on a second, even given that global warming exists, there is no way this warm period is caused by global warming because you can't equate local weather to general climate.

The fact that the arctic or any region is experiencing warmer than usual weather lately doesn't mean that climate change is happening or that the weather is a result of climate change.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-sk...

[sgt101]

No, it doesn't.

The causality is unidirectional; there is no entailment in the sense that a period like this could occur without global warming or without global warming effects being responsible for this particular episode.

However, the prior probability of this event is influenced by the warming of the system overall. The expectation that an event like this will occur in a given season is higher if you have a warmed planet than not.

That doesn't mean that it will happen, or that if it happens it's because of global warming. If there is global warming this event is more likely and should be expected more often.

[acqq]

> there is no way this warm period is caused by global warming because you can't equate local weather to general climate

No. There's no way that some warm or cold period can only be caused by global warming (or that it can disprove it). Since thevformer are extremes at the specific point in time, the later is the trend (averages, compared year-to-year).

But some period can be so extreme that it's a big news if it breaks the records compared to all previous measurements. This is the case this time. If it breaks the records in the direction of the trend, it can point to trend getting even stronger. You won't know if the trend actually got stronger until you make new averages, but it is worrying enough.

To compare with something you know: you drive every day 1 hour between two places. You know that your speed at some specific point in time never gets under some value, for example, you never had to stop. If you stop somewhere and wait 1 minute, it doesn't mean you won't have chance to speed up and still get on time. The average can still be the same. You'll know when you're there. But if you day to day have to wait, first day 1 minute, the next 2 minutes, after some number of days you can know that you can't think "maybe I'll still be on time" when you break the wait "record" of all previous days. Now, the climate is one level above: it's not even how fast is one car but how fast are all cars everywhere, if we speak about the whole Earth climate. That's why the denier claiming "but I feel I drove this small route here faster" (i.e. "it seems warm in my town now," not even comparing the actual historical measuremens) is not disproving "it's warmer every year on the whole planet."

The averages are here:

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/global-temperature-t...

[Oletros]

But when a region so huge as the Artic or the Antartic have a trend of increasing temperatures we can start to think that there is a change