Earlier today, Jim Hoft linked to an article reporting that the Department of Homeland Security was forming a task force to judge how FEMA might respond to natural disasters caused or exacerbated by climate change. To most people, that might seem pretty reasonable. After all, while the effects of climate change are unpredictable, there is, at the very least, a severe risk that it will lead to volatile and potentially catastrophic weather. In fact, according to the Associated Press, 2010 was “the deadliest year for natural disasters in more than a generation” -- and climate change may be at least partly to blame.

But to Hoft, none of that matters. Why defer to the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community? Instead, it's easier to mock the Department of Homeland Security for trying to adapt to changing circumstances.

To Hoft, the scientific consensus doesn't matter because there are record cold temperatures in the British Islands and the southern United States. Hoft writes:

Do these people ever look outside?...
- Great Britain and Ireland are experiencing their coldest December ever recorded.
- The southern US is breaking all kinds of cold temperature records.
- The freezing temperatures are causing record deaths in London.
But, facts won't faze the radicals in the Obama Administration.

He said it: decades of peer-reviewed expert research must be wrong, because it's cold outside. And therefore, the Department of Homeland Security shouldn't prepare for what the scientific community warns them is already happening.

But what makes this sad isn't just the stunning ignorance Hoft so proudly showcases. It's that no matter how many times we explain it to him, he can't seem to figure out that short-term weather fluctuations (whether record cold in December or record heat in July) do not, by themselves, prove or disprove the existence of human-caused global warming.