Rachel takes the clowns at ClusterFox to task for pretending they don't know the difference between changes in the weather and climate change. The science guy Bill Nye weighs in and explains why watching these idiots conflate the two disturbs him so much.
Stewart and Colbert both had a field day with Fox for this as well.
MADDOW: All right. There we go. Although the interstitial random Kent outdoor was almost more perfect. Of those full-court shots, the first one was college, the next four were all high school—high school games. Players making full-court shots—just incredible, right? I have to say, it was very cool to spend my snowy day in my office today, searching YouTube for all of those clips.
But no one would say that seeing those clips, seeing those shots, disproves that trying to make a 90-foot shot in basketball is a hard thing to do, right? I mean, even though there‘s evidence that it can be done, shooting from the backcourt is hard, and coaches, therefore, probably shouldn‘t plan on always making that shot in order to plan to win games.
Everybody understands that, right? It‘s the difference between observing a specific thing and understanding whether or not that specific thing is a fair representation of how things are generally in the world.
It‘s simple, right? It‘s kind of like being an adult. Everybody gets that—apparently, unless you are in politics.
In politics right now, full-court shots aren‘t hard. We know that because we‘ve seen YouTube clips of kids making them. In politics, now, whatever we‘re looking at right this instant disproves everything else we know about the world.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)
GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS HOST: I don‘t think it takes a genius to see through the “more snow is proof of global warming” claim.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sixty-three percent of the country is now covered in snow. And it‘s breaking Al Gore‘s heart, because the snow is also burying his global warming theory.
SEN. JAMES INHOFE ®, OKLAHOMA: The global warming hearing that Barbara Boxer was going to have tomorrow has now been canceled because of the blizzard.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It‘s almost too easy!
SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS HOST: It‘s the most severe winter storm in years, which would seem to contradict Al Gore‘s hysterical global warming theories.
Rumor has it that another storm could be headed this way next week!
Global warming, where are you? We want you back.
(END VIDEO CLIPS)
MADDOW: See the science at work here? Clearly, the climate can‘t be changing because there‘s a storm this week on the east coast. Sean Hannity has proven that there‘s no such thing as global warming because Sean Hannity feels cold.
We dispatched THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW‘s chief winter weather correspondent, Mr. Kent Jones, to try to confirm Mr. Hannity‘s intrepid reporting—Kent.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KENT JONES, POP CULTURIST: It‘s still snowing. It‘s still snowing. A lot of snow. Snow, snow, snow. It‘s still snowing. It‘s not not snowing, it‘s snowing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Deny that. Huh?
Breaking news, we can now confirm, it is cold and it is snowing along the east coast in February.
You know, if one person wins the lottery, that‘s awesome for that person. But it does not disprove the existence of the recession. When it rains in the desert, that does not disprove the existence of the desert. It‘s still a desert, right there, even in the place where it rained.
If you have smoked a cigarette in your life and you are not currently suffering from lung cancer or heart disease, your existence—while healthy and happy—does not disprove the fact that smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease.
The evidence we have of flight—birds, bees, airplanes, what-have-you, does not disprove the existence of gravity.
The existence of monkeys does not disprove evolution.
The existence of tadpoles does not disprove the existence of frogs.
Full-court shots are hard. Evolution is real. Gravity is real. The recession, real. Deserts, dry. Smoking, bad. Frogs exist. Also, so do storms.
The fact that it is snowing somewhere, anywhere, at any one time, does not tell you any useful thing about the overall climate. NASA says—you know, those hippies at NASA—NASA says that global average temperatures for the last year were the second hottest year on record, ever. The past decade was the warmest decade in the past 2,000 years.
But it‘s snowing somewhere today, so that must all be meaningless!
If we‘re going to take one fact about the current weather and use it to obfuscate every other observable truth about the climate as a whole, I would like to add one thing to the mix. There‘s no snow in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics. Everybody, panic! Read on...
