[braindongle]

This is great. People who don't trust experts and cynically think that everything is political can readily say "It's really cold! See, global warming and climate change are fake!" Here we see that the polar vortex isn't extra-strong this year, it's extra-week, and the breakdown may send chunks of it southward.

This armchair level of understanding (even if my summary is not right on the nose) is what we need when we encounter people who actually want to politicize the weather. Will we defeat ignorance, or will ignorance defeat us?

[vkou]

> Will we defeat ignorance, or will ignorance defeat us?

It's not ignorance that's the problem. The people orchestrating global warming denialism aren't stupid - they are just cynically self-serving.

[thysultan]

Then stop using the word global warming, poor marketing, when it gets cools(which it will) instead of warm it starts to look and sound a con. The more enlightened skeptics are more so "human caused" climate change skeptics than anything else, with the sun as their main point of origin.

[braindongle]

Agreed, "global warming" is poor marketing. It's also a common colloquialism among climate change deniers, no? So, if you need to explain to someone how cold weather doesn't mean "global warming is fake", maybe also steer them toward the notion of climate change. "Anthropogenic forcing" or "it's our fault" is of course another important matter.

[braindongle]

Is it one or the other? I don't know anything about dark rooms where captains of industry who profit from fossil fuels orchestrate climate denialism. Sounds plausible. But in any event, such efforts are surely more difficult, if possible at all, with an informed citizenry.