Deniers Can’t Snow Us with “Snowmageddon”
By Michael Beck
They can’t have it both ways.
Those who loudly deny Climate Change science as a hoax and an attack on the American lifestyle have pounced on the record Mid-Atlantic blizzards to make their point. The snowiest season ever recorded in places like DC and Philadelphia couldn’t possibly have happened, they tell us, if the planet were really warming, let alone warming because of human impact. Oklahoma Senator Inhofe (“The greatest hoax ever perpetrated …”) even had a snow fort constructed and called it “Al Gore’s Home.”
The climate-change skeptics have overlooked just one inconvenient detail. While t
he all-time record hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 were rampaging through the American South, consigning names such as Katrina, Charlie, Ivan and Wilma to infamy, the deniers stridently insisted that the storms were nothing more than long-term cyclical variations and that they couldn’t possibly have any statistical connection to global warming.
Come again? We can count extremes in one direction but not the other? Real scientists, the folks who study all the facts with balanced skepticism and who submit to regular peer-review, call it cherry picking the data. Actually it’s worse, because one predicted consequence of a warming climate is more intensely irregular precipitation. Thus the great southeast drought of 2007 (remember that Atlanta water crisis?) comes paired as much with ‘snowmageddon’ as with the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. Scientists also note that the all-time records were set for snow, not for cold, as well as th
e fact that Canada was enjoying an unusually mild and dry winter, one that made it necessary to truck snow to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Legitimate scientists never trumpet single weather extremes as proof of anything. At most they will cite these events as possible evidence of long-term trends, relying rather on the relatively un-sexy yet massive build-up of data from a large array of sources such as glacier retreat, species migration, and rising ocean acidity, to name only three (more on this in my next blog). And underlying the myriad strands of evidence, two rock-hard facts stare out at us: long-term global temperatures and CO2 levels have been rising relentlessly since the mid 1800s. (See the temperature and CO2 graphs posted with my last blog entry on February 8, below.)
Even if I were not an environmental activist, if I had to choose who to believe between ideological demagogues and mainstream climate scientists, I have no doubt where I would look to get my facts.
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Photos and images:
(Top) NW DC, Feb. 2010
(1st Middle) Senator Inhofe’s ‘snowmageddon’ photo-op
(2nd Middle) Close-up of Inhofe’s dig at Al Gore [Al Gore’s Home]
(Bottom) Jan 2010 global temperature anomaly: notice the extreme warmth across Canada [upper middle left] which drove the jet stream further south to pick up extra humidity from the Pacific and the Gulf, which then fell as ‘snowmageddon.’
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