NYT:

WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. It was uploaded to a nonprofit internet digital library in January but received little attention until it was published by The New York Times.

RTWT

Is that so? How very, very odd.

All over America, ordinary people think that the weather varies dramatically by region, that we’ve all seen warmer summmers years ago than any recently, and that the weather in recent years has been different from year to year but in no way strikingly unusual.

I guess you have to be a Climate Scientist, a New York Times editor, or a community of fashion member of the Establishment to be equipped with the kinds of privileged insights and hyper-sensitive sensory organs that can detect those effects of climate change, along with extraordinary educational training enabling you to predict dramatic weather effects far off in the misty future. The rest of us, even the ordinary people meteorologists, can only imperfectly predict the weather a week or two in advance.

Myself, I guess I must have been not paying attention at Yale, because I find myself completely at a loss when I attempt to sit down and try to define exactly at what point we find ourselves today along the Interglacial Cycle. I must have slept in the morning when they explained what exactly causes Glaciation and the whole cycle of earth’s warming and cooling and how you can tell just where on the cycle we should be and exactly what proper normal climate conditions would be like.

Isn’t it wonderful that there are all these people so much smarter than the rest of us, who know all these things, and who are able to define precisely what the earth’s normal climate would look like and who can measure accurately the negative impact of mankind’s pernicious productive activities and, on top of all that, predict for us all their terrible, terrible consequences?

Me, I’m a bit uncertain at what point later this afternoon a thunderstorm is likely to arrive, and I’m as likely as not to get rained on when I go out to pick up the mail.