Climate change: The ‘cold winter’ debate

“If global warming is real, then why is it cold out?” said Scott Bixby in TheDailyBeast.com. That’s the mocking question posed by climate trolls whenever the thermometer drops—and especially during this frigid winter.As storms transformed Georgia into “IcePocalypseMageddon” and a “polar vortex” sent temperatures plunging from Chicago to Mexico, skeptics across the country gleefully ridiculed the idea of a warming planet. “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bulls--- has got to stop,” tweeted that great scientific mind, Donald Trump. “Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.” What the skeptics are forgetting, said Justin Gillis in NYTimes.com, is the “global” part of “global warming.” Yes, the American South has been colder than average this winter, but Alaska and parts of Russia have been “downright balmy,” and Australia has sizzled in temperatures of 113 degrees. Taken as a whole, “the world really is warming up.”

How can you be so sure? asked Larry Bell in Forbes.com. For years, many respected climate scientists predicted that due to sunspot cycles, the earth was about to enter a long-term cooling cycle—a “Little Ice Age.” Could that explain why the slight warming trend seen up to 1998 has gone into a perplexing “pause”—and why it recently snowed in Florida? The “Four-Alarm Fire Brigade” hysterics won’t even consider such a possibility. You have to give the alarmists credit, said Charles C.W. Cooke in NationalReview.com. By changing their branding from the ironclad prediction of “global warming” to the beautifully ambiguous “climate change,” the scaremongers can point to any weather event—from Hurricane Sandy to droughts to floods—to support their prediction of “the end times.”

Please take your head out of that ostrich hole, said David Horsey in LATimes.com. As the atmosphere warms in response to rising carbon dioxide levels, climate scientists say, it holds more moisture and can produce more snowfall. Indeed, warming can change wind patterns and lead to more extreme weather of all kinds: In the last two years, we’ve seen a spate of record-breaking Midwestern tornadoes, a brutal California drought, and torrential rains that have left much of Britain underwater. Elsewhere, governments have moved beyond debate and started making plans to deal with climate change’s impact. Some Americans, however, “remain in a deep freeze of denial.”

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