It’s getting to be that time of year again! The first snow-storm of the season is heading for the Northeast. Some communities could receive almost a full fluffy foot. The snow will probably melt quickly, it’s still early Fall. But the annual industry funded snowjob on climate change may have barely started.

This particular scam works like this: ignore actual global temperature data, conflate local snowfall with record global cold, claim that disproves algore, aim all the above at the non scientific laypublic. Obviously any climate scientist — or half-witted high school graduate — understands that snow only means the temperature is near or below freezing. Whereas record cold means the temperature hits an all time low, and global cold would mean this happens worldwide. But a nice little blizzard gets a lot of people who don’t think that through grumbling about the weather and therefore receptive to misinformation. Scamsters eager to misinform sure as hell aren’t about to point the yawning difference between record local snow fall and record global cold. That might ruin the scam.

We certainly can’t count on them to explain that, all other things being equal, colder air holds less water vapor, or that a snowball earth would have little precipitation of any kind. Putting more energy into the atmosphere means systems can be warmer and wetter, in the case of snow storms that means warm and wet enough to produce a lot of snow. The same extra energy provides additional fuel to move those systems around, in some cases they’ll move farther and faster south than they would have otherwise.

Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove

So if there’s record snow — if it starts snowing in Miami every year for crying out loud — how could anyone say the planet is actually in a warming trend? Not hard. The same way people can say if their kid has a real fever or is trying to pull a fast one. Thermometers! Using thermometers we can take temperatures. Scientists have been doing this for a long time, decades in fact, all over the world. Last week a group of more skeptical scientists put that temperature data through the wringer and grudgingly concluded the consensus was right all along. Global warming is a pretty literal term, the criteria are clear, and they look like the chart at the top of this graf reflecting those very results.

But that BEST data changed the minds of climate skeptics, or in the case of some they hastily revised their personal history to claim they never doubted the earth was warming in the first place. Right? And if they never doubted the data, and accept the latest findings of their skeptical peers, then surely we won’t see another annual celebration of each and every blizzard as the end of global warming like they did in year’s past.

We’ll find out soon enough. It’s getting to be that time of year.