The Patriot Post® · Weather Isn't Climate ... Unless It Is

We humans love to talk about the weather. And rightly so: It’s by far the number one conversation starter around the world. The weather is the one thing that all people — no matter their background, language, place of origin, or level of intelligence — can talk about because everyone experiences it. We simply can’t escape the weather.

Yet in the past several decades, the leftist ecofascists have hijacked the conversational topic of weather. They’re convinced that humans are destroying the planet, and in recent years their conversation has gotten even more desperate. We’re now told that we have less than a decade to drastically change our behavior. Or we’re doomed.

The Left, in its attempt to push the climate catastrophe agenda, now frames just about every adverse weather event as proof of detrimental climate change. When hurricane seasons produce more storms than the norm, it’s blamed on climate change. Of course, when hurricane seasons are milder than normal, the doomsayers are silent. The breakdown of the most active hurricane seasons by year and frequency is more widely disbursed over time than might be assumed given the Left’s narrative, and the same goes for record snowstorms by state. Clearly, not all the most violent weather events have taken place in the last 20 years.

But the prevalence of weather news coverage in modern times, combined with the generally negative tone that accompanies such storms and adverse weather events, tends to distort the facts. News media report only the work of agenda-driven climate scientists seeking to push a specific narrative. And this group tries to make its case by focusing almost exclusively on short-term trends going back only a few decades. Its practitioners conveniently forget that climate change is a long game, with trends that last centuries, even millennia, and is affected by much more than internal combustion engines. Perhaps the biggest influencer of our weather on Earth is the sun, which follows 12-year solar cycles that are most assuredly unencumbered by human behavior.

Short-term reporting on daily temperature fluctuations is a favorite for the environmental Left in pushing its narrative. Except, of course, when that data doesn’t go its way.

USA Today recently did a “fact-check” savaging a social media post claiming to debunk global warming. The Instagram post stated that actual global warming trends were less than the margin of error and therefore proved “the noisy UN campaign about a climate crisis is fake.” In a moment of classic pearl-clutching, USA Today claimed that the post lacked context. “Climate trends,” it huffed, “are determined by temperature changes over decades or longer, not a single day’s data.” The paper also noted that its “fact-check” work “is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.”

Independent third-party work indeed.

The Left can’t afford to let even one piece of adverse data get through to the public. There’s simply too much at stake in its campaign to control the people via a radical climate agenda. The high-level narrative is simple: Human behavior is responsible for climate change, therefore controlling human behavior is necessary to save us. The argument has even gone cyclical. Climate change is now being blamed for domestic violence against women in developing countries, according to The Washington Post. The thesis is that farmers take out their frustrations over failed crop yields on their wives and children. Really?

This is a textbook example of correlation being used to prove causation, and the article even admits that it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove a direct link between violence against women and climate change.

But it’s the headlines that sell and “inform” most readers. Since that’s the case, it’s time we started reading a little deeper into these stories.