No kidding: Norway's Socialist Left Party (SV) is promising better weather if people vote for them in the upcoming local elections. There's a little problem with the slogan though: bad weather usually refers to cold weather, while SV wants to stop the global warming. And after having one of the worst summers in Oslo in human memory, people aren't exactly put of by the idea of global warming if it leads to some local warming too.

The Socialist Left Party, a member of the Norwegian coalition government since the 2005 elections when it gained 8.8% of the votes and 15 of 169 seats in the Norwegian Parliament (Storting), has always profiled itself as the climate party in Norway. For the local elections this year, to be held next week, one of the slogans is «Lei av dårlig vær? Stem SV!», which translates to «Tired of Bad Weather? Vote SV!». But does this slogan make sense at all?

Traditionally, bad weather has always meant cold weather, rain, snow, hail, ice, fog, floods, etc, but never warm or hot weather, not even heat waves. Coincidentally, Oslo has had one of its worst summers in a long time and people are indeed getting tired of the bad weather. Newspapers had been predicting the arrival of summer for two or three months, constantly scheduling it two or three days ahead, until they gave up somewhere in the middle of August. Not to worry though, they say, the autumn will be warmer than usual, and in fact by the end of this week temperatures will be higher again. No really. Seriously. In any case, if you want to find somebody in Oslo who's still afraid of global warming, not to mention local warming, it won't be easy to find one. My guess is that even some of the employees at the headquarters of SV have wondered these past few weeks where global warming is when you really need it.

What else behind this election promise? Well, for one thing, SV proves again that green parties like to play on the emotions of the not-so-well informed people who can't or don't like to think for themselves. They do the same thing in the nuclear debate or in the debate about GMOs. Literally the slogan does not make any sense at all, but I have to admit that it does sound good if I turn my brain off for a moment. Another thing is that their supporters make strange arguments to defend the slogan, like they do in other debates. There are two arguments explaining why this election slogan is supposed to make sense after all. The first one is that global warming supposedly causes local cooling in Norway, in particular in the area around Oslo. This theory was rejected years ago, but it never really died in the minds of some people. The second argument is that the bad weather in the slogan does not refer to the bad summer we have had in Oslo, but to the bad weather in the rest of the world. The problem with that argument is that it isn't clear why people living in Oslo should be tired of bad weather on the other side of the globe, except maybe for all the media fuzz around it caused by environmental organizations and green parties like SV. Seems more like an argument why not to vote for SV, if you ask me.