Carly Fiorina's Ridiculous Climate Change Ad

California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina is quickly becoming more well-known for her ads than for her platform. First came her famously bizarre demon sheep and Barbara Boxer flying-head commercials. Now, the fired Hewlett-Packard CEO has released an ad that equates climate change with the weather.

The commercial shows a clip of Boxer, a Democrat and the California incumbent, calling climate change a national security threat, after which Fiorina declares: "Terrorism kills—and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather?"

Naturally, this isn't sitting well with some. As The Huffington Post put it succinctly: "Is that ridiculous, or what?"

Ridiculous? Yes. Uncommon? No. The perceived correlation between weather and climate change has been at the heart of several conservative attacks on environmental legislation over the years. It arguably reached its apex during Snowpocalypse, when the GOP jumped on a record snow season as proof that global warming wasn't happening. And it has continued to persist in the kind of rhetoric Fiorina is using.

Let's get this straight right now: Climate and weather are not the same thing. The EPA kids site puts it in easy-to-understand terms. Weather is "whatever is happening outdoors in a given place at a given time...what happens from minute to minute," and climate is "the total of all weather occurring over a period of years in a given place. This includes average weather conditions, regular weather sequences (like winter, spring, summer, and fall), and special weather events (like tornadoes and floods)."

In other words, climate is talking about long-term changes, and weather about short-term changes. A cold day, or a snow storm, does not constitute a change in climate, but merely a change in weather. To say the two are the same is both scientifically unsound and powerfully dismissive about the problem of global warming. Fiorina's words have no doubt impacted how some people perceive the gravity of climate change, and this is troubling.

Beyond that, the ad is premised on the idea that terrorism is a real threat, while global warming isn't. This conveniently plays into the "liberals are soft" notion, and also conveniently denies the facts. The National Intelligence Council and even the U.S. military have warned about how climate change threatens security, since it exacerbates, among other things, climate migration, floods, and water disputes.

Fiorina needs to get the memo. Boxer is worried about climate change, not the weather. And climate change is a national security threat.

Photo Credit: Agencia Brasil/ Wikimedia Commons