Donald Trump Laughing About Climate Change Again Because Fuck Puerto Rico, Right?

If it weren't horrifying, it'd be kind of pretty. Yes, that's a hot NORTHERN hemisphere in December

The East Coast is being hit by some incredibly cold weather, we hear, with authorities warning folks to avoid frostbite and hypothermia and stuff, so of course, since winter still exists, Donald Trump decided it was high time to make the exact same joke he's made many times before: It's cold, so global warming has to be fake.

That is a real knee-slapper, every bit as funny as it was when Trump used it to disprove global warming a hundred thousand million times:  

Also, says Trump, "they" changed the name from "global warming" to "climate change" once scientists realized nobody believed the globe was warming, haw haw, so "they" changed it -- another nice bit of lying, since in mere reality, the G.W. Bush administration did the most to promote the term "climate change" when a Frank Luntz focus group found people were worried and motivated to do something by "global warming," but far more complacent about "climate change" -- with the added benefit that Republicans could happily say they believe "the climate has always been changing." So shut up, Donald Trump.

Still, in the charming belief that even Donald Trump -- or two or three of the many people who saw his Tweet -- can be educated, the Weather Channel pointed out that at this particular moment, North America is experiencing a cold snap all right -- while the rest of the Northern hemisphere is abnormally warm for December:

The linked article carefully explains -- once again, for presidents who don't read good and kids who want to learn other science good too -- the difference between "weather" and "climate," which really are not the same at all. They even explain it with both formal definitions and a nice analogy:

NASA makes this distinction: "weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere 'behaves' over relatively long periods of time."

Dr. Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia's atmospheric sciences program and former president of the American Meteorological Society, has said that "weather is your mood; climate is your personality," meaning a single weather event like a heat wave cannot be linked to climate, but long-term trends are better indicators of a changing climate.

That may not be the best analogy, come to think of it, since Donald Trump's mood is usually angry, like his personality, so the distinction might be lost on him. Still, because we love Neil deGrasse Tyson and his doggie, let's roll the video one more time:

For fools who think science might be real, the Weather Channel article notes that even this cold snap could well be related to global warming, which is obviously crazy, because it's cold, right?

"Several groups of scientists have found that warming in the Arctic and the resulting loss of sea ice are making it more likely that the jet stream will take dramatic wintertime dips and push intense cold outbreaks into midlatitude areas, such as the eastern U.S.," [Weather Underground's Bob Henson] said. "These cold waves aren’t enough to compensate for the overall warming of the climate across the whole planet."

Henson notes that while some parts of the eastern U.S. are expecting bitter, record-breaking cold for New Year’s Eve, it "doesn’t mean human-produced climate change is something we’ve put behind us," adding that the eastern U.S. occupies less than 1 percent of the world’s surface [...]

"The unusually warm, dry weather of early December fed into the catastrophic wildfires that struck Southern California," Henson said. "Meanwhile, Alaska is having one of its mildest Decembers on record, causing problems for transportation."

Isn't science cool? Or actually, increasingly hot? Incidentally, this week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the Arctic "shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades."

Hmm. Better cut their funding, then. That will make global warming go away.

Here's another old tweet that's been making the rounds in reply to Trump's hilarious joke, from Stephen Colbert:  

Mmmm, burned steak with ketchup. Why don't the hungry people just have that?

Or here's an idea, from some lame chick we don't know.

hey could you send some of those trillions to Puerto Rico? they still don't have electricity.

— Rebecca Schoenkopf, Wonkette Editrix, King Of You (@commiegirl1) December 29, 2017