This was only a matter of time....  Global warming is causing the 
snow...


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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/earth/11climate.html

Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze 

Published: February 10, 2010 
WASHINGTON — As millions of people along the East Coast hole up in their 
snowbound homes, the two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing 
on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments. 

Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock 
those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks 
more like global cooling, they taunt.

Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent 
with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more 
intense weather events.

But some independent climate experts say the blizzards in the Northeast 
no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in 
Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is 
warming.

As an illustration of their point of view, the family of Senator James 
M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, a leading climate skeptic in 
Congress, built a six-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and put a 
cardboard sign on top that read “Al Gore’s New Home.”

The extreme weather, Mr. Inhofe said by e-mail, reinforced doubts about 
scientists’ conclusion that global warming was “unequivocal” and most 
likely caused by human activity.

Nonsense, responded Joseph Romm, a climate-change expert and former 
Energy Department official who writes about climate issues at the 
liberal Center for American Progress. 

“Ideologues in the Senate keep pushing the anti-scientific 
disinformation that big snowstorms are evidence against human-caused 
global warming,” Mr. Romm wrote on Wednesday. 

It is perhaps not coincidental that the snowstorm scuffle is playing out 
against a background of recent climate controversies: In recent months, 
global-warming critics have assailed a 2007 report by the United 
Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and have claimed that 
e-mail messages and documents plucked from a server at a climate 
research center in Britain raise doubts about the academic integrity of 
some climate scientists. Earlier this week, Rush Limbaugh and other 
conservative commentators made light of the fact that the announcement 
of the creation of a new federal climate service on Monday had to be 
conducted by conference call, rather than news conference, because the 
federal government was shuttered by the storm.

Matt Drudge, who delights in tweaking climate-change enthusiasts, noted 
on his Web sitethat a Senate hearing on global warming this week was 
canceled because of the weather. 

As the first blizzard howled last weekend, the Virginia Republican Party 
put up an advertisement on the Web — titled “12 Inches of Global 
Warming” — criticizing two Virginia Democrats, Representatives Rick 
Boucher and Tom Perriello, who voted for the federal cap-and-trade 
legislation last year. The advertisement urges voters to call Mr. 
Boucher and Mr. Perriello to ask if they will help with the shoveling.

Speculating on the meaning of severe weather events is not new. 
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and a deadly heat wave in Europe in the summer 
of 2003 incited similar arguments about what such extremes might — or 
might not — say about the planet’s climate. 

But climate scientists say that no single episode of severe weather can 
be blamed for global climate trends while noting evidence that such 
events will probably become more frequent as global temperatures rise.

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground 
blog, said that the recent snows do not, by themselves, demonstrate 
anything about the long-term trajectory of the planet. Climate is, by 
definition, a measure of decades and centuries, not months or years.

But Dr. Masters also said that government and academic studies had 
consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just these kinds of 
record-setting storms because warmer air carries more moisture.

“Of course,” he wrote on his blog Wednesday as new snows produced white-
out conditions in much of the Eastern half of the country, “both climate-
change contrarians and climate-change scientists agree that no single 
weather event can be blamed on climate change.

“However,” he continued, “one can ‘load the dice’ in favor of events 
that used to be rare — or unheard of — if the climate is changing to a 
new state.” 

A federal government report issued last year, intended to be the 
authoritative statement of known climate trends in the United States, 
pointed to the likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in the Northeast 
and less frequent snow in the South and Southeast as a result of long-
term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Climate Impacts report, 
from the multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also 
projected more intense drought in the Southwest and more powerful Gulf 
Coast hurricanes because of warming. 

In other words, if the government scientists are correct, look for more 
snow.

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