News flash: Summer is hot

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• Updated July 3, 2012, 3:51 p.m. ET

Hot Enough for You?

Apparently it is, if you're a global warmist.

By JAMES TARANTO    WSJ.COM

When the weather is cold, we think it's cool to make fun of global warmism. Invariably when we do so, global warmists get hot under the collar. You fool! they thunder. Climate isn't the same thing as weather! Of course we understand that. Cool down, it's a joke.

It's a joke designed to make a point--a point worth revisiting now that it's hot out. And it is hot: As we write, Google informs us that the temperature in New York, outside our lovely air-conditioned apartment, is 88 degrees. Over the weekend we were in Tennessee, and at one point our rental-car thermometer informed us the outside temperature was 111, albeit on blacktop.

We'll give you three guesses what Associated Press blames for the heat:

If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change . . .

They are also the kind of extremes anyone who lives in the Northern Hemisphere can predict will come with July. News flash: Summer is hot. And actually, the AP dispatch switches midsentence from global-warmist alarmism to an acknowledgment that weather isn't climate:

. . . although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.

Tell that to the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, whose column today begins pretty much the same way the AP story does: "Still don't believe in climate change? Then you're either deep in denial or delirious from the heat. As I write this, the nation's capital and its suburbs are in post-apocalypse mode. About one-fourth of all households have no electricity, the legacy of an unprecedented assault by violent thunderstorms Friday night. Things are improving: At the height of the power outage, nearly half the region was dark."

Reuters

Men at work in 94-degree heat.

It's even scarier than that. Last night the sun fell into the ocean, leaving the Earth both hot and dark. (Flat, too, according to Thomas Friedman.) Fortunately, by morning there was a new sun. But if the obstructionist Republican Congress doesn't act quickly to solve this problem, it's only a matter of time before we run out of suns.

Seriously, though, when we point out cold weather to mock global warmists, we're satirizing the sort of cherry-picking arguments that global warmists routinely put forth. When it's hot in July, it's global warming. When it's cold in January, climate isn't weather. You science-hating idiot.

The Washington Post reports that a new survey finds public concern about global warming cooling: "Just under four in 10 polled say global warming is extremely or very important to them, the lowest percentage since 2006 and down from 52 percent in 2007. Just 10 percent say it is extremely important to them personally, down from 15 percent in 2011 and 18 percent in 2007."

The average man, it would seem, knows enough to be skeptical of overheated rhetoric and fallacious arguments. Why are so many journalists by contrast so credulous?