Why I Believe In Global Warming

I would have gotten to this sooner, back when there was still snow on the ground, but I didn't have a blog then...

It seems that since we had the coldest winter in 7 years, all of a sudden this public outcry of right-wing thinkers has arisen, denouncing global warming. A couple examples:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/03/13/global-warming-update-winter-2008-coldest-seven-years

http://blog.briangriffiths.com/2008/04/baby-its-gonna-get-cold-outside.html

Now, I'm not in a state of denial. I know we had the coldest winter in 7 years:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080313_coolest.html

So how then, can I possibly be so silly as to believe in "global warming" when this single winter has erased all of it?

Because it hasn't.

The problem is this tendency of people to look at the weather outside their door right now, and say "Dude, it's hot today, must be global warming." Now I think part of the problem is us science-minded folks who understand global warming were too lenient about such misunderstanding of science when it went in our favor. Every time I heard someone tell me, "It's hot today, must be global warming," I knew that wasn't the right understanding of how weather and climate works, but their error was in my favor, so I didn't bother to correct their flawed thinking. I regret not stomping out misconceptions about science whenever I encountered them before. Now that the shoe's on the other foot, we reap the rewards of such tolerance of ignorance.
We get just one cold winter, and now those same people are telling me, "It's cold out there, global warming must be wrong!" These people are the "sunshine patroits" of global warming: when it's hot outside they think the ice caps are melting, when it's cold outside they think a new ice age is starting. The problem they don't quite understand that any single year's weather is not the same as the long-term trend... or just how long-term (and chaotic) the Earth's climate really is.

Global warming is a trend. Global warming is not today's temperature, or this month's temperature, or even this year's... it's the way the average temperature of the planet has been going up, on average. Individual years can vary a lot. They might even dip to a 100-year low, or a 100-year high, but the warming trend is still there among the random fluctuations.

To use a metaphor, if the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a dip for 5 minutes, would you say a bull market had suddenly become a bear market?

Regardless of what happened this winter, I can say with a high level of confidence global warming is still the direction the temperature of the planet is headed.