How can global warming be real when there is so much snow and cold weather?
That’s what some people wondered after a couple of massive snowstorms buried
Washington, DC, in the winter of 2009–2010. Politicians across the capital
made jokes and built igloos as they disputed the existence of climate change.
Some concluded the planet simply could not be warming with all the snow on
the ground.
These comments frustrated Joseph Romm, a physicist and climate expert
with the Center for American Progress. He spent weeks turning data into information
and graphs to educate anyone who would listen as to why this reasoning
was incorrect. Climate change is all about analyzing data, turning it into
information to detect trends. You cannot observe climate change by looking out
the window; you have to review decades of weather data with advanced tools to
really understand the trends.
Increasingly we see politicians, economists, and newscasters taking tough
issues and boiling them down to simplistic arguments over what the data
mean, each interpreting the data and spinning the data to support their views
and agendas. You need to understand the data and turn them into useful information
or else you will not understand when someone is telling the truth and
when you are being lied to.