Christmas Day, the temperature outside reached 67˚F. Boxing Day, we received more than four inches of snow.

December 27th in southern New Mexico, about 3 a.m., taken with ambient light only (no flash).

December 27th in southern New Mexico, about 3 a.m., taken with ambient light only (no flash).

Cold snaps like this remind me of how hard climate change is to explain to those who chose not to understand. Such instances set off the “A winter storm in December proves that Global Warming is a hoax” crackpots on their periodic rants featuring hackneyed and long-discredited right wing talking points. But instantaneous weather is not climate. While January may have cold days, the predictive models have been proven by empirical data. A slightly warmer day in the dead of winter may make no discernible difference to you as a a person. The same single degree difference will, however, have a measurable effect on the rate of, say, glacial melting. Scientific analysis of empirical evidence is ineffective, however, next to the selectively remembered individual event of a particular year in the minds of certain people.

In the words of Upton Sinclair:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, (1935)

But really, this was just an excuse to show a strange flashless picture taken in the middle of the night.