We're havin' a heat wave, a terrible heat wave...

Remember back last winter when it was cold in the Northeast? There was snow on the ground and the Inhofe clan in Washington, D.C. built snowmen with messages on them like "The snow won't stop until Al Gore cries uncle." All the deniers in the Senate and the House of Representatives were having a wonderful time deriding the science of global climate change. They claimed that the cold winter, along with the stolen private emails of climate scientists that showed them being human, proved that global warming was just a myth. I even wrote a blog post about it at the time and invited the deniers to meet on the Capitol steps on August 9 - which just happens to be my birthday - to discuss this "cooling" trend. We're still a month out from my birthday, but the offer still holds.

Now that the temperatures in the Northeast have hit triple digits on consecutive days and at least three investigations of the East Anglia email "Climategate" have cleared the scientists of doctoring their data, the deniers have gone rather quiet. Never fear. I feel absolutely certain that next winter when it snows again in Washington, they will again be chortling about how this disproves the claims of the scientists.

And, of course, they will still be wrong. Weather is not climate. Weather occurs over a period of days. Climate occurs over periods of years, decades, centuries, millenia. The current heat wave does not prove that global warming is happening. That being said, the data of the last several decades clearly indicate that the earth is warming up and is warming up much faster than it should under purely natural circumstances. Thus, the current heat wave in the Northeast and in many parts of the world may serve as a warning of what is in store for us if we don't act now to ameliorate the part of the warming that is the result of human actions.

So back in January and February, the purveyors of conventional wisdom were saying that an energy and climate change bill could not pass Congress because it was snowing. So now that it's hot, such a bill should pass easily, right? Right??? Oh, the Congress is not is session.

Sigh. I despair for my country. I truly do.

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