Nothing pisses me off more (well, ok, lots of things piss me off more… I’m easily pissed off. But for the sake of agument let’s go with this) than people who either seriously or jokingly say “So much for Global Warming, it’s so cold outside today!”

Listen up and I’ll explain:

Increases in the amount of greenhouse gases make the world warmer. They are called greenhouse gases because they trap heat, being transparent to sunlight coming into the atmosphere, and opaque to various wavelengths of infrared radiation emitted by matter warmed by the sunlight.

The atmosphere becomes more energetic, and thus more active. Heated objects expand, so does heated air and water and land.

Now, there is a temperature gradient from the equator to the poles because of the angle at which the sun’s rays strike the Earth.

The Southern hemisphere has more water and a continent at its pole. The Northern hemisphere has most of the world’s land, and a small ocean at its pole.

Thus the two hemispheres heat unevenly. The Northern hemisphere heats faster because it has more land and because that’s where most of the human-caused emissions occur–it’s like dumping feathers–they spread out eventually, carried by the wind or water, but first they pile up.

The continent of Antarctica is surrounded by a circular current of water and a circular current of air that helps to keep it cold, even as the southern hemisphere warms. It is also very high. It is the highest continent. Much of it is more than two or three miles high–because of all that ice.

Antarctica is a very conservative mass. Since it takes vastly more energy to melt ice than to warm air or water, it is taking a very long time to warm the high plateau of East Anarctica.

At the other pole, however, the ice is floating on water for the most part. Heat dumped down the temperature gradient is melting this ice. Thermal expansion and heat absorbed by open water is melting this ice from below.

This makes for a much more variable and turbulent system. The land in the Northern hemisphere is warming, while the sea warms more slowly. Except in the North. The land and the sea are both warming there because they are the bottom of the temperature hill.

Canada and Australia have warmed twice as fast as the world as a whole, for example, They are near the bottom of their respective temperature gradients. The West of the USA has warmed at close to the Canadian rate. It is cut off from the sea by the Rocky Mountains.

Now, when you pump more heat into an unstable system, like the Northern Hemisphere, it becomes more unstable.

Think of a lot of hot air–it flows upward and pole-wards. Cold air has to flow the other way to make room. Thus, the more you heat the tropics (and the land), the more hot humid air flows northward, and the more likely the cold air is to dip southward, especially in the American and Canadian West.

It normally does this. In a warming world, it can be counted on to do this more.

Thus, this year you have a jet stream which has dipped down as far as Florida and Arizona. There is a high pressure area over the North Atlantic which is helping to lock this dip into place. Europe is also cold because it has its own dip of the jet stream. Siberia is not that much colder than usual.

Last year was exceptionally warm. All years have been exceptionally warm for the last decade. But it has been exceptionally cold in North America. This is something that happens normally sometimes, but you can expect more of it while the world warms. The cold air and the hot air have to mix somewhere and somehow.

In other words, you can expect more blizzards in odd places and at odd times. Warm humid air is a good way of carrying heat and water. But eventually it has to dump its heat and its water. If the place is cold enough, whumpfff! you get a massive amount of snow, or hail, or rain.

While the global warming deniers have been clipping the charts to focus on the last ten years, claiming that it’s getting colder, and on the USA, where it IS colder than elsewhere, but not that much colder than winters were like when I was a kid, the world as a whole has continued to warm.

It’s a kind of tunnel vision, or horse-blinkers, that horses who don’t want to be distracted by where they are going put on, so they can pretend they’re not going any where.

Last year was one of the warmest on record globally. This year is likely to be another.

And take note: it doesn’t matter how much snow falls or ice forms in the winter if the summer melt is greater than can be replaced. You can have very cold winters or normal winters, but the ice gets thinner every year. The area may yo-yo almost up to “normal” for the last few thousand years, but it’s going, going, gone! –at least in the summer.

We don’t have to worry about Antarctica because the bulk of its ice is protected by the sea bed, which has a sort of bowl like “lip” that keeps water from flowing under the main bulk of East Antarctica ice.

Of course, when water warms enough to melt the ice back off of this lip, it will pour into the bowl and then the East Antartica ice sheet will be threatened with unbelievably rapid collapse (over centuries, all the same).

This is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, but is one big wildcard hidden in the deck for our species as a whole.

In short, the human race is living in a fool’s paradise. The long-term effects of things we are arguing over now could really, really do a lot of damage 10,000 years from now, or for that matter in 500.

The precautionary principle says we should be careful, even about the unknown unknowns, let alone the known unknowns, the known knowns and those rara avis, the unknown knowns, the stuff we know is true but don’t know we know is true, such as the fact that global warming deniers are completely full of BS and a lot of them know it. How many BSers know they are BSing? We don’t know. A lot. I am assuming all the people with a vested interest know that they are pursuing their vested interests, not the truth. That would be anybody with a vested interest (or mental or emotional investment) in coal, oil, natural gas, the wrong sort of bio-fuels, planes, trains and automobiles, not to mention the consumption society and mass affluence Euro- or American-style.

Well, that would be nearly all of us living in Fools’ Paradise, wouldn’t it?