A Blizzard Of Global Warming Stupidity

Time Magazine's Bryan Walsh looks at how a record-setting blizzard like what we've seen this week supports evidence of climate change.

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? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that's what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming.

Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. 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.

But there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, the intensity of those storms has increased. That's in part because of global warming — hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall.

Climate models also suggest that while global warming may not make hurricanes more common, it could well intensify the storms that do occur and make them more destructive. 

(More after the jump...)

Ahh, but record snow can't mean global warming, scoffs the Right.  John Hinderaker proclaims:

You know you're not dealing in the realm of science when anything that happens is adopted as confirmation of a hypothesis. A scientific theory is one that generates predictions that can be verified or falsified. Global warming doesn't qualify.

Besides the apparent fact that Hinderaker's a bad scientific observer, he's missing the point:  More greenhouse gases in the atmosphere means more heat trapped in the overall global atmosphere, and more energy in the system.  Measuring global climate by a week of blizzards in one part of the world without taking into consideration the entire planet is mendacious.  While it's winter here in the States, Tibet is experiencing record heat and so is New Zealand.

The whole system is seeing far more extremes as a whole, even places like Cincy.

Cincinnatians scorched under the sun in 2007, with five days above 100 degrees in August. A drought that same year cracked the earth, killed trees and left residents parched.

Remnants of Hurricane Ike blew across the Tristate in 2008, knocking out power to 90 percent of Duke Energy's customers in September and causing millions in dollars of damage and leaving lots of spoiled food.

So if 2008 was the year of the windstorm, 2009 was the year of a warm March day that set a record near 80 degrees.

The year started off capital 'C' cold with a dusting of a half-inch of snow on Jan. 14, followed by a blast of frigid air that plunged nighttime temperatures to zero and below for the next few days.

Unseasonably warm weather kicked off in February and ramped up in March, when average temperatures were almost four degrees higher than the month's 47.5 average. The high in March was 77 on March 10, an eye-popping 25 degrees warmer than that day's average temperature.

Still, the region managed to get 25.9 inches of snow throughout the year, more than two inches greater than the 23.2-inch average yearly snowfall.

Hell of a lot of weather swinging in just 32 months or so.  And yet even with the record warmth here last year, we got more snow than usual last year.  We certainly will again this year too.

Global warming is unbalancing the system.  It's like hitting a balanced see-saw with a sledgehammer and watching it totter back and forth.  One side goes up, one side goes down, but eventually if you keep hitting the end of the see-saw -- that is, adding energy to a balanced system -- you're going to break something.

That's what we're doing with greenhouse gases.  That's why we need to stop it.