Indianapolis Closes in On Top 10 Coldest January Since Official Temperatures Began Being Kept

Today, with just three days left days left in the month, the average temperature for Indianapolis during the month of January stands at 19.8 degrees.  If that number holds, then we'd be tied for the 10th coldest January since official record-keeping began in 1871.

Four of the coldest Januaries took place between 1963 and 1979, with 1977 being by far the coldest at 10.3 degrees.  (These stats can be found at this website.)  Of course, 1963 to 1979 is the era before the invention of automobiles and coal-fired plants that caused global-warming.  Okay not

During his speech, President Obama stated "global warming is a fact."  You bet it is.  The climate has been changing since the planet was formed.  That's not the issue though. The issue is whether there is dangerous anthropogenic global warming taking place.  The alarmists have worked hard to redefine the debate as "climate change" instead of "global warming" because some of the data wasn't working out and they were being discredited.  By changing the debate to "climate change" they knew they could never be proven wrong.  After all, after 4.6 billion years it's unlikely the planet's climate will suddenly stop changing.

Of course, my pointing out that Indianapolis is on its way to one of the coldest Januaries ever will be met with howls of protests that this is "weather" (short term) instead of "climate" (long term).  And you know what?  On that point, the alarmists are 100% correct.  But the problem is the alarmists are also hypocrites.  They won't hesitate to use weather when it works in their favor. The hot summer we had a couple years ago was pushed by alarmists as proof our planet had dramatically warned. Last night the President talked about the droughts out west as proof.   How is that not weather?  Oh, wait, I forgot. It's never "weather" when the alarmists are using it as evidence of global warming climate change.

We human beings have a misplaced sense of time. We think what we experience on planet Earth during our, if we're lucky, 80 year life spans represents conclusive proof of the long-term direction of the planet.  Instead that 80 year life span is merely a tiny grain on a sandy beach which represents the billions of years the planet has existed.  Even the 140 years or so that man has been keeping official records, which is consistently used by alarmists as the barometer to measure long-term global warming, is a tiny speck of time in the lifetime of our planet.

The reason you can't use snippets in time to measure the long-term direction of the planet is that the planet's climate is always changing.  The the long-term warming and cooling periods can last hundreds of thousands of years if not millions.  In between those periods you have briefer periods - tens of thousands of years - in which the temperature zigs up and zags back down  The alarmists want to latch onto a zig and extrapolate it out showing Earth's temperatures increasing endlessly.  Scary stuff indeed.  But good science? Absolutely not.

But what of the CO2 levels that have increased so much?  Even the alarmists when pressed admit that 97% of the CO2 comes from natural sources, not from man-made activity.  The notion that the increase in CO2 levels is entirely due to man, or even mostly, is pure speculation. In fact, CO2 levels have been higher than today, before man, and CO2 appears to be a lagging indicator of higher temperatures not a cause.

To paraphrase that great environmentalist and inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, these facts are an inconvenient truth.