The New York Times ran an unintentionally hilarious piece by Judah Cohen on Christmas Day with the ironic title “Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming.” The article begins, no joke: “The earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside.” Cohen proceeds to helpfully detail the record cold and snow lately experienced in North America and Europe before reassuring the reader that this nonetheless is evidence of anthropogenic warming.
This is only the latest in a stream of such articles and op-eds to appear in the mainstream media the past year, and no wonder – good liberals shivering in the elite cities of the West must not be allowed to let their experience cast doubt on their faith in the global warming God. “[O]verall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes” – so sayeth Cohen, one the High Priests of Warming at the New York Times.
Yet is there any doubt that if our winters were of late unseasonably warm, that, too, would be pounced on as proof of catastrophic climate change? The question must be asked– if any weather at all can be proof of a theory, then what use is that theory? Indeed, how is it a theory at all?
Imagine I came to you and said, “I have an elf sitting on my head.” And you said after an inspection of my claim, “Well, I don’t see or feel an elf.” And I said, “That’s because it’s invisible, and intangible.” One might then reasonably then ask: What is the difference between an invisible, intangible elf, and no elf at all?
The answer, of course, is very little. And the difference between a weather theory that cannot be disproven by any weather and no theory at all is likewise miniscule. How delicious that the largely secular global warming movement– by positing an unfalsifiable theory – has painted itself into the exact same cul-de-sac of philosophical fallacy and logical inconsistency which plagued the medieval defenders God’s existence.
Matt Patterson is senior editor at the Capital Research Center and a contributor to Proud To be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation (HarperCollins, 2010). His email is [email protected].
