In what is surely a sign of things to come, The Daily Mail wrote an article claiming that land temperatures were actually dropping, prompting Breitbart to summarize it, and then prompting a House committee to tweet it – which resulted in a storm of angry debate over the subject.

Scientists slammed the news report on Friday, which claimed the recent record-high global temperatures had nothing to do with climate change. Scientists say that while it had something to do with El Nino, it also had a lot to do with climate change, and the Earth will continue to get warmer long after El Nino is gone.

The fight pits Trump supporters, who deny the existence of climate change, with the left, mainstream media and scientists, who all say that global warming is undeniable at this point. Federal and international agencies expect 2016 to be the hottest year on record, beating a record set only last year.

But the Daily Mail report claimed that a recent decline in temperatures over land after El Nino ended this year was a sign that global warming was a hoax. However, scientists countered that climate change was part of that rise, and it wasn’t all due to El Nino.

El Nino causes water temperatures to increase in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which results in changes to the weather around the globe. La Nina, the opposite condition, has moved in to take its place.

Even with global temperatures plunging, scientists argue, it will still be much warmer than normal.

In addition, the report cites land temperatures only, even though that’s just 30 percent of the surface of the Earth and are often much more variable than over water, because land doesn’t store heat well. That’s why scientists look at global data rather than singling out one type of data, they say.

But those facts aren’t convincing to people who have already made up their minds, and serve as nothing more than weapons to do battle with in a Twitter war raging online. Trump supporters and the left are going to war over an issue that is in the hands of Republicans and Donald Trump for at least the next two years, which means global warming advocates are likely to be left out in the cold.