Suppose you're an idiot …

… and suppose you hold high office — but I repeat myself. (Apologies to Mark Twain, who made this point originally.)

The corruption of language that characterizes so much political discourse is nothing new. In fact, it seems to be part and parcel of the political process. That does not make it any less deplorable. This morning's headlines feature a prize example.

It seems our esteemed Secretary of State has decided to weigh in on the climate debate. He has no scientific credentials, so he issued what was something on the order of a diplomatic communiqué, saying roughly this:  "The official position of the incumbent administration regarding all the back-and-forth about climate that has been going on lately is that the warmists are right and those who disagree are denialists." 

Boilerplate, except for the characteristically grating hauteur. The Secretary always looks as if he just caught a whiff of something unpleasant in the air. Perhaps he listens too carefully to himself.

When I was in grade school, and the nuns taught us how to diagram sentences, the first thing we had to do was identify the subject of the sentence by asking, "What or whom am I talking about?" 

This is a good question to ask about a lot of things. If you look up climate online — and where else does one look up anything these days? — you will soon discover that Wikipedia's entry is comprehensively standard:

Climate is a measure of the average pattern of variation in temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological variables in a given region over long periods of time. 

The term, in other words, applies to regions. Earth has no climate. It has several. Always has. It was cooler than now in the tropics during the mostly very cold Pleistocene epoch, but it was still nice and warm there.

Wikipedia goes on to point out that "climate is different from weather, in that weather only describes the short-term conditions of these variables in a given region."

The important thing to note here is that climate is long term, weather short term. So any extrapolation from weather to climate is necessarily dubious, especially since the only truly verifiable figures are less than 200 years old.

There is plenty of evidence that the climate profile of our planet hasn't always been the way it mostly has been for the 11,700 years of the Holocene (the period we are living in). Climate change — the phrase is redundant actually, change being what climate is about  — has been going on for practically as long as the Earth has been spinning. 

There is  also probable cause to believe that human activity has exerted some effect on climate. Agriculture must have, if only by making it so much easier for humans to increase and multiply, which they certainly have. Throw in cities and manufacturing and commerce, and all the subsequent waste needing to be disposed of, and you've got a factor best not ignored. 

But still no match for the sun. Or cosmic rays. Or ocean currents. 

So where does this leave us? 

Well, it seems evident that for either side in the debate to cite isolated weather events  as supporting or confuting one position or the other betrays a lack of understanding that climate is "an average pattern of variation in … meteorological variables in a given region over long periods of time"  (see foregoing about long-term-to-short-term extrapolation, shortage of data, and age of Earth).

So what can we do about climate change? Apart from picking up after ourselves, which is always a good idea, it's largely out of our hands, the Secretary of State's pontifications notwithstanding. 

We're no better off now than we were when Charles Dudley Warner (not Mark Twain) said that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Which is why the Secretary probably thought it was a good idea to change the subject to climate.