One of the thing that drives me the craziest about the ignorance-embracing climate change deniers is that as soon as the temperature goes below 32°F, their remarks are as predictable as sunrise: "Whew, it's cold! Where's Al Gore's global warming when we need it? HAR HAR HAR! I'm so hilarious!

And yet when my home was in a tornado watch on December 27, they were completely silent. Imagine that!

Jed Lewison noticed the same thing on a national scale:

Remember just a few days ago when the entire Flat Earth Society Conservative Establishment was gleefully cheering on the "heavy" snow to hit Las Vegas and other unlikely parts of the country?

You know how each and every last one of them prattled forth about how this wintertime snowfall proved that global warming was a hoax?

Well, you don't hear much from any them now that a rash of high temperatures is sweeping the country from the midwest to the southeast and threatening to unleash widespread flooding, do you?

(Image from http://www.weather.com.)

Not a peep on Drudge Report, the assignment editor for the Anti-Science Society of America. Not a word from the other wingnuts.

Because the truth doesn't fit their narrative.

They work really hard to point out cold weather in winter because it's all they have left:

It goes without saying that the case for global warming does not rely on the list of news stories I posted above.

The scientific literature does not depend on cherry-picking.

But the fact is, the entire argument of the deniers does depend on cherry-picking. They seize on stories like the snowfall in Sin City and pimp the heck out of them.

Around the margins, their cherry-picking strategy has done them a little bit of good. In the end though, it mostly illustrates how close they are to losing the political battle for good.

Here's what their cherry-picking propaganda has delivered them: over the past few years, there has been a modest decline in the proportion of Americans who believe global warming is real—down from a peak of 79% to 71% earlier this year. As you might expect, that decline is almost entirely attributable to a sizable drop in Republicans who believe global warming is real, going from 62% to 49% from January 2007 to April 2008.

Despite the mild success of the right-wing anti-reality machine, the absence of a coherent, intellectually sound argument in defense of their position will ultimately erode the power of their campaign of misinformation.

Their problem is simple: at the same time that the scientific explanation for global warming becomes more well-known, the cherry-pickers narrative will be increasingly betrayed by a torrent of weather events undermining the story they hope tell.

They've already lost the battle with everybody but the most rabid of partisan Republicans. Soon, they will lose that battle too.

It's therefore no surprise that the GOP's "scientific literature" can only generously be called "cherry-picking," since much of it is just flat-out lies.