And Now They Confuse "Weather" and "Climate"

And by "they" I mean the editorial board at Scaife's Tribune-Review.

Take a look at what they're pushing today:

The New York Times reports that the stubborn cool spring in the Midwest has produced the most dismal start to the nursery season in decades. Darn that “climate change.”

Here's the Times piece upon which they're basing their contra-evidence.  Amazing how far flung they now have to go.  It's a piece on gardening.

But it illustrates one of the faux "debunkings" of climate change: namely that it's cold outside my window now, so therefore the climate can't be warming up.  Here's now the Times piece begins:

The freakishly cold Midwestern winter of 2014 has given way to the frustrated Midwestern gardener.

The stubbornly cool spring, on the heels of a bone-chilling winter, has produced the most dismal start to the season in decades, nursery owners say. In previous years, some garden centers may have sold half their stock at this point in the spring. Now they are barely getting started.

So this is about, at least in part, about the Polar Vortex that it the midwest and east coast this past Winter.  But did you know that while we were freezing the otherside of the world was burning?

Take a look.  From the AP:

Bats are dropping from trees, kangaroos are collapsing in the Outback and gardens are turning brown. While North America freezes under record polar temperatures, the southern hemisphere is experiencing the opposite extreme as heat records are being set in Australia after the hottest year ever.

Weather is localized.  Climate is global.  And what's the story on the global picture?

Let's go to NOAA:

The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces for the first quarter (January–March) of 2014 was the seventh warmest such period on record. This is particularly notable since February ranked only as the 21st warmest on record. However, January and March were both among the five warmest for their respective months. The warmth was relatively evenly distributed between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, with each also observing their seventh warmest January–March on record.

In fact according to some new data:

While April was an uneventful month temperature-wise in the U.S., with most areas experiencing near-average temperatures, the month was the second-warmest April on record globally, according to new NASA data.

That makes April the 350th month in a row — more than 29 years — with above-average temperatures, largely caused by the buildup of manmade greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.

And yet because the braintrust reads that gardeners in the midwest are having a hard time this year because of the localized cold, all that science is wrong.