dax, you get seriously pissed off about a pic you found on the internet and a story from your brother while totally ignoring satellite photos of disintegrating icecaps. that makes you look really dumb.
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Obtaining and keeping temp records (particularly over a substantial geographic area) for the purposes of year - to - year comparisons is exclusively for the study of climate. The expansion and retraction of Ice Caps is clearly climate as well.
Weird little meltdown and digression.
No, really these kinds of discussions are pretty fun for me. No meltdown at all, and certainly not a digression, at least not on my part. I'm not here to argue AGW because I don't really give a flying f about it (or at least anyone's opinion of it) and I am not here to argue politics either, which you seem to clearly want to bait folks into. Sorry, but I'm not interested in that. You see, for me it's more the semantics of the thing...and the logic too.
My point is you were clearly correlating two separate concepts:
Climate = ice caps disintegrating and growing over earth's history based on geologic information (not weather data)
and
Weather = accurate terrestrial temperature measurements and records over the past century and a half (weather data)
As false equivalences go, this is a pretty common one. I mean, most average people won't notice or care, they'll just get into a shouting match with you which I'm sure is the goal. But any half intelligent person would dismiss you out of hand because of your carelessness. I'll try to explain.
You can't say we can know for certain that there has been other warm or cold periods in Earth's history based on geologic information (read:
not accurate weather data) on one hand, then immediately turn around and dismiss assumptions like 2016 and 1998 were historically warm years because we only have accurate weather data for the past 150 years on the other. False equivalency. Can you disprove the second assumption using geologic information? If so, then leave the weather records out of it. If not, why bring it up? Doesn't do any good. Can you prove the first assumption using weather data? Of course not.
See? You're arguing two sides of the same debate with yourself and getting mixed up in the process. It would have been smart to just stick with the ice cap thing and roll with that for now. It's a good one and you're right about it...uh, sorta. But by injecting your political agenda you got caught in a logic trap, oh well. Next time, maybe try not to rage-post so much and put a little more thought into what you're writing, and you'll probably be a lot more interesting...or don't do that and stay boring, doesn't really matter.
Bu now I'm sure you'll pound out a 5 minute paragraph or two in response here being all rage-y about what I'm saying then add a dismissive little tag at the end...perhaps questioning whether I'm someone's sock...I bet if I kept this thread alive I could even get you to resort to personal insults. In the end, though, you'll move on to one of maybe a dozen or so other little internet discussions you have that you feel compelled to "win" daily, and I hope they're fulfilling for you. Maybe you can get a better shouting match out of one of them.