Angry Mob and Anton Vowl take on Richard Littlejohn over climate versus weather

Richard Littlejohn tackles climate change – again – and makes the point that as it is cold outside climate change is therefore a conspiracy concocted to victimise honest taxpayers. This is par for the course (Littlejohn mentions saving the Polar Bears yet again in this column) but it is interesting to see that this time Littlejohn actually attempts to tackle the criticism he gets in his comments:

Ah, say the ‘experts’, there’s a difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’. They are forced to resort to semantics to sustain their insistence that the science is settled, even though they are all sitting there shivering like brass monkeys. They’d still cling to their belief in man-made warming if Hell froze over.

So there you have it: the only difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ according to Littlejohn is semantic. I wish everything in life was as simple as Littlejohn makes out, but sadly things are a little more complex than that and the cold weather outside today says nothing about climate change or the climate in general. I guess this is why Littlejohn rarely engages in criticism of his points, because when he does he looks feeble-minded, rather than just ignorant.

http://www.angrymob.uponnothing.co.uk/home/95-richard-littlejohn/862-the-semantics-of-climate-change

After all, the reason why there are different words for different things is often because they’re different. Climate means something very different from weather, although they both talk about rain, and sun, and so on. Either this is too hard for Littlejohn to understand – and I do wonder sometimes – or he’s decided that he can dismiss what anyone else says on the basis that they’re simply using two different words that really mean the same thing.

Using Littlejohn’s reasoning, there’s no difference other than semantics between a cat and a dog – if I think they’re the same thing, then they’re the same thing, and it’s only people trying to pull the wool over our eyes who try to use different words to describe them.

http://enemiesofreason.blogspot.com/2010/01/who-cares-what-words-actually-mean.html