Weather: Opening Up a Cold One

Andrew C Revkin, writing in the New York Times, has a well balanced piece on the recent global cold spell. January was a cold month by recent standards, and the whole winter saw some unusual cold outbreaks. The climate skeptics who think every snowstorm disproves global warming were quick to sieze on this:

“Earth’s ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way,” read a blog post and news release on Wednesday from Marc Morano, the communications director for the Republican minority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Some of the same propagandists are trying to use the moment to promote their own theories of climate: solar cycles, cosmic rays, whatever.

Cooler heads, including some skeptics, say it's too early to say. One robin doesn't make a summer, and one snowstorm (or even a few cold months) don't make a climate trend.

Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist and commentator with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, has long chided environmentalists and the media for overstating connections between extreme weather and human-caused warming. (He is on the program at the skeptics’ conference.)

But Dr. Michaels said that those now trumpeting global cooling should beware of doing the same thing, saying that the “predictable distortion” of extreme weather “goes in both directions.”

Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan who has spoken out about the need to reduce greenhouse gases, disagrees with Dr. Michaels on many issues, but concurred on this point.

“When I get called by CNN to comment on a big summer storm or a drought or something, I give the same answer I give a guy who asks about a blizzard,” Dr. Schmidt said. “It’s all in the long-term trends. Weather isn’t going to go away because of climate change. There is this desire to explain everything that we see in terms of something you think you understand, whether that’s the next ice age coming or global warming.”