ok here's what i'm talking about. it is a leetle hard to stay in extreme crisis mode about the heat as you freeze ass and get buried in yet another blizzard. the task as the climate scientists conceive it would be to back-model the years-long cold snap so it turns out to be compatible with global warming, or better yet so that it turns out to be caused by global warming (cohen moves from very provisional speculations straight to: "The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.") then the model you produced (involving snow cover in siberia in this case) is used to try to make people hold on to global warming in the face of the fact that they themselves are losing digits to frostbite in orlando. that one could produce such a model is not exactly tantamount to the fact that that is really what happened.

so ask yourself: what evidence would you or judah cohen accept as counting against the notion the the earth is growing warmer? what data would actually make it impossible to model the earth's atmosphere as growing warmer? or what would cause you to start with a question other than, how do we make this compatible with warming? when that is the question, there will always be an answer; you just have to keep refining the model, or throwing into it another interesting speculation. and it is the question: or else you won't be publishing in our journals, employed in our universities, and so on, because any other approach shows that you're not doing good science, = you have reactionary politics. it is impossible to assess the quality of the evidence for global warming: it is produced in an atmosphere in which only dogma and self-delusion can possibly emerge, in which the purpose of the research is moral grandstanding and public policy prescription. i think we might want to worry about the way 'science' and 'evidence' or even 'reality' ("The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it") are used in this discourse: their rhetorical function. in the course of mounting your case, y'all don't want to discredit your entire model of human knowledge and send us back to sheer faith or something.