Global Warming Fanaticism

To deny facts in the face of a disaster is breath-taking. But here's a bit from a Time Magazine article that wants to claim that record-breaking snowfall is just one more proof that we are in the grip of global warming that is going to burn us to a crisp:

Another Blizzard: What Happened to Global Warming?

As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven't we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change?

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There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.

And I'm guessing that these same guys were investing like crazy in the "sure-fire, can't loose, Dow 36,000" theory as the stock market tanked from mid-2007 until February 2009. And each time it dropped another 10% or 20% they would high five because this was just more evidence that we were well underway to that 36,000 point record for the Dow Jones Industrial Average index.

You have to admire the audacity of proclaiming global warming in the teeth of a century record-breaking snowfall! But... fanatics grimly soldier on in the face of facts. They can't be bothered with facts. They have truth by the tail.

Note: I'm not claiming that record snow falls mean "global cooling". I'm in the camp that "climate change" means what it says: climate fluctuates up and down. There is no long-term discernable pattern that we can project in the future. (Yeah, the past is full of "patterns" but nobody cares that you can read ice ages or warming periods in the past. The argument is whether we have evidence for impending "global warming" or "global cooling". We don't. At least not given the current state of scientific understanding.)

What's funny is the guy writes a fairly large number of paragraphs selling the idea that these big snowstorms are to be expected because of global warming, then he suddenly changes tack:

But as far as winter storms go, shouldn't climate change make it too warm for snow to fall? Eventually that is likely to happen — but probably not for a while. In the meantime, warmer air could be supercharged with moisture and, as long as the temperature remains below 32°F, it will result in blizzards rather than drenching winter rainstorms.

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Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season's worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate.

Whoa! If he really believes this, then why write the article?

It is pretty clear that this guy is fundamentally unserious. First he says "this is global warming" then he says "but it may not mean global warming". Nutty! If this is just a "meaningless" storm, then why even raise the question of whether this is consistent with global warming?

What I find amazing is that people pay good money to buy this kind of "magazine writing".