As the mercury climbs out of last week’s below-zero pit, we get further and further away from all the unpleasantness that comes with it: numb hands, dead car batteries and, most pernicious of all, global warming deniers.

Every winter, as people pile on more layers than Nanook of the North (save, of course, for one bare, smoking hand), some chucklehead always takes the opportunity to snort and say “So much for global warming, huh?”

For starters, it’s not funny – Drew Carey had that bit covered and played out ten years ago, which probably means Dane Cook has swallowed it into his act by now, too.

But second, saying it’s cold in Northern Illinois does not equate to proof that the average global temperature isn’t rising.

We’re not the center of the universe for one thing, and for another, no scientist is going around saying that global warming means you’re never going to be cold again.

Averages don’t work like that. Let’s say, for example, you’re taking a science class about global warming. Over the past four semesters, test scores have been, on average, rising for this particular professor.

Most of the rest of the class gets A’s and B’s on their final, but you, since you got the questions on global warming wrong, fail the test and the course.

And as you walk out of the class, you say, “So much for higher test scores, huh?” Just as a rise in test scores still allows for idiots, an average rise in temperature still allows for a few days each year where my eyelids freeze shut while I’m walking to Walgreens.

I’m not going to go over the global warming debate (more accurately called the global climate change debate because warming isn’t the only thing that happens), because that’s been covered extensively elsewhere by people much smarter and more well-versed in the subject than I am, or you are.

If you’re not convinced by the firm opinion of the vast majority of the scientific community, or the sheaves of evidence collected over decades by the most careful methods, then I doubt I’m going to convince you with a few hundred words’ worth of admittedly witty writing.

But that’s hardly the point here. Even those scattered few scientists who do disagree with the notion that we’re impacting global temperature would adhere to more rigid standards than simply looking out their own window and deciding that it’s cold outside.

A global problem is like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces scattered to the four winds. One piece is air bubbles trapped below the ice of Antarctica. Another piece is the snows melting from the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Polar bears drowning in the North, severe weather patterns in Southeast Asia and small sea creatures dying off in droves are all bits and pieces that seem inconsequential by themselves but assemble, Voltron-like, into something far larger.

It’s true that I have to take a good chunk of this on faith. I lack the specific schooling to challenge much of this data, and I lack the available funds to get out of this state, let alone travel the world collecting my own answers.

Part of me simply has to assume that with so many people working so hard researching this problem, they know what they’re doing. Because I’m frankly not qualified to do much else. And neither, I’m fairly certain, are you.

So really, just shut up.