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Global Warming knocked out by winter. Yes, it’s a cartoon. But the text with it is great too:

NOAA and NASA Want Antarctica To Melt You don’t hear much about the ozone hole any more. Has it gone away? Nope. NOAA and NASA say in 2006 it was bigger and deeper than ever.

But wait, you say, we implemented the Montreal Protocols in 1989, eliminating ozone depleting CFCs. Kofi Annan called the Protocol, “Perhaps the most successful international agreement to date.” CFC concentrations have been falling since 1995. How can the ozone hole be worse?

It’s not worse, says NOAA, it’s better. It’s just that you can’t see how great the Protocol is working because colder than average temperatures in the Antarctic mask the benefit. Cold weather “result[s] in larger and deeper ozone holes, while warmer weather leads to smaller ones.”

Colder in Antarctica? Al Gore told me it was melting! Al Gore told me there was consensus. Consensus!

In case you’re wondering, here’s the NASA/NOAA article about the size of the ozone hole (which is roughly the same size as the hole in Algore’s head):

From September 21-30, 2006 the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles.

One nice thing about living in Colorado is that the weather is schizophrenic. It’s also very specifically local.

That is, this morning I left my house in a bank of fog. It was 23 degrees. My house is on a hill where temperatures are always colder than the surrounding areas though, but the radio said it was still only 27. Anyway, starting in toward downtown, we ran through some heavy snow for about 1/2 mile (this was explained as being caused by lake effect, although where it was falling isn’t near any bodies of water that I know of). In any case, the snow had been falling for some time, or else was falling a lot harder moments before we got there, because there was already enough snow to cover the roads completely (just FYI, it was in the 60s yesterday and all the snow we used to have had melted). Then, after that 1/2 mile, it was back to just fog.

Now, it’s sunny outside. Oh yeah, it’s also 50 degrees.

So my question is…with such a wide extreme range of differences between my house, on the top of a hill, and downtown where I work, what is the “official” temperature for this city? (Don’t worry–the answer is, whatever the airport temperature is.)

This becomes important for an obvious reason. If we measure the average temperature at my house, which tends to be about 5 degrees cooler than the surrounding region, then the average temperature will be 5 degrees cooler than if you take the temperature elsewhere–but within a mile of my house. Five degrees doesn’t seem like much.

Until you realize that global warming proponents are concerned about a single degree.

The temperatures varry that much just moving the thermometer from one side of a street to the other side.

Or consider this. Almost all of us have seen football games that occur in snowy weather. On the sidelines, they have those massive heaters that boost out thousands of BTUs of heat.

Yet the temperature at the middle of the field doesn’t rise at all. Step about five feet away from the heater and it gets cold fast. Touch the flame and your hand will burn off, yet all that heat dissipates and is absorbed by air within just a few feet of the source.

So what is the average temperature of the stadium? If you put the thermometer inside the flame, you’ll have hundreds–even thousands–of degrees; but a thermometer at the middle of the field will be cold. Moving the thermometer changes the average temperature; yet the actual temperature at any specific spot has not changed at all.

This is the fallacy of global warming. The assumption that the weather IS in its totality whatever it is at one limited spot is simply naive. The assumption that if the average temperature rises in one limited spot it means the average temperature everywhere is rising is likewise naive.

And none of this even addresses whether human beings are responsible for any of it.