Whenever anyone makes a connection between climate change and a particular weather event, there is inevitably a pedant who finds a different example that seemingly disproves it. Heatwave in Europe? But it was a colder than usual winter in Canada. Flooding in the Midwest? But it was drier than usual in California. Drought in the Southwest? But there was higher than average rainfall in the Northeast. And so on and so on and so on.

To anyone who even slightly follows climate change science, all of these events are actually symptomatic of the underlying process of human caused climate change. Climate change not only means that global average temperatures are increasing, but also that weather is becoming more erratic and intense. However, this is true at the global level, and not necessarily true for every particular location at every particular time. Consequently, some places might sometimes experience normal weather or even more pleasant weather, even if, when we aggregate all the data at the global level, this isn’t at all the case.

As for the pedant, they generally rely on a different type of evidence than do climate scientists. Rather than the global data on which climate scientists rely, the pedant draws on local anecdotal evidence instead, and then uses these anecdote about particular locations in order to deny patterns that we see in the broader data. In other words, they find the exception to the rule (the place it happened to be colder this year), and then argue that the exception disproves the rule (that average global temperatures increased). It’s a faulty form of argument, but a common one nonetheless.

However, if we examine these two forms of argument in this way, I think we miss the point.

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