adventuresinchemistry:

megababysky:

adventuresinchemistry:

so the west coast is on fire and a category five hurricane is about to make landfall right on the heels of a category four storm but climate change isn’t real

okay, yeah, that makes total sense all the weird weather is just what? the planet rebelling against the current literally evil administration? No, not that? oh, alright then…idk i’m gonna take a wild stab at this and say climate change might actually be a thing? 

like, maybe? we’ve spent the past, oh, two hundred or so years pumping the atmosphere so full of crap that it’s not literally trying to murder us, but then, what do i know

We always hear that a year of unusual snow doesn’t disprove climate change because weather is small scale and climate is long-term trends.

So like I get and heartily agree with the anger at those who deny climate science and everything, but I think citing climate change for disasters like this is slightly problematic. Because climate is longterm weather patterns, not isolated events.

(Unless I am mistaken, of course. I’m no climatologist. I’m barely a chemist and struggling to even be called ‘barely’, but.)

Okay but the thing about long term trends is that long term heating of the ocean leads to more super storms occurring more frequently.

and they make weather patterns less predictable. And so summers get weirder and winters get colder and unusual snow happens and the polar vortex and sure, no individual event can be said to prove or disprove climate change but they become more frequent and harder to predict.

Broader patterns are made up of individual events. That’s how data work. Each storm is a data point. A single piece of the broader whole.