Bob CollinsSchools are already canceling classes for Monday because, as you know, it’s January and it’s cold (this comes just five months after some schools were closed because it was August and it’s hot).
Where’s your global warming now?
(h/t: Scott Olstad)
Stuart Capstick,a research associate in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, specializes in public understanding of climate change, writes in The Guardian’s environment blog today that fewer people now are using cold weather to feed the skepticism of climate change.
The extent to which people were already sceptical about the evidence base, human causation and impacts of climate change made a major difference to the meaning they placed on the weather. Sceptics tended to agree the winter constituted evidence against climate change, but the study’s results show that non-sceptics were at least as willing to accept the alternative position.
In a further sign of the political polarisation which has come to characterise climate change, people’s underlying worldviews – about seemingly unrelated topics such as discrimination against minorities or the distribution of wealth – in turn predicted the judgements they made about the cold weather.
Meanwhile, in California, the rivers are running dry and the reservoirs are low as a drought continues to plague the region.
And in Australia, another heat wave is hitting the continent. Temperatures should reach 107 degrees and officials are worried about the availability of water.
We’re doing OK in Minnesota, thank you very much.
