February 10, 2010

RFK Junior, Where are you now? Stuck in a Snow Bank?

Robert Kennedy Junior, 15 months ago: Global warming means no snow or cold in DC. Really? No snow - global warming. Too much snow - global warming. Saints win the Superbowl - global warming. No doubt.


David Freddoso in the Washington Examiner has the story;
Having shoveled my walk five times in the midst of this past weekend's extreme cold and blizzard, I think perhaps RFK, Jr. should leave weather analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change.
Alright, so is he going to take Time to task over this pretzel logic?
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.
Okay, I'm in Toronto, north of the big Northeast storm. We've barely had any snow this winter - it's been too cold! And that's just an off the cuff observation about the silliness Time is trying to propogate.  Wait, here's another - the article mentions the truly vicious cold snap LIKE THE ONE IN JANUARY.  It contradicts itself.

How about StopGlobalWarming.org in 2006 saying global warming means less snow for skiers in the NorthWest?  Does storm then mean that global warming affects different parts of the country differently?  Then I've got a solution; move to the part of the country that suits you.  Move the farms.  Move the ski resorts.  The end.

Obviously one storm or two does not a scientific rebuttal make, but the eco-police try to use every warm snap to say we are doomed too.  What is even more troubling is this sentence in the Time article;

After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer - and the past decade was the hottest on record.

Is that a fact?  No!

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