It’s Warm Outside. Somewhere.

Bradford Plumer counters climate change skeptics trumpeting the recent chilly weather in the eastern US:

Here's a handy animated map from NOAA showing all the places on the planet where it's unseasonably warm and unseasonably cool right now. Curiously, the freak cold seems to be occurring everywhere major media centers are located—the northeastern United States, Europe, Japan—so the chilly weather's grabbing all the headlines. But it's anomalously warm just about everywhere else in the world, especially the Arctic.

But this piece suggests that a cyclical pattern is cooling us temporarily even as the long term prognosis remains worrying. Which means that the politics of persuading people to move away from carbon just got even harder. Of course I once feared Ptown would disappear beneath the tide. Now it just seems like we'll have a lifetime of crappy summers.