For decades, climate hysterics have been warning that global warming would eventually lead to a world with far less snow. In the year 2000, British climate scientist David Viner, a senior researcher at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (the same East Anglia of the “climategate” e-mail scandal) went so far as to say that within just a few years, snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event,” and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”
Currently, children from Maine on down to the mid-Atlantic region of the United States are having no trouble remembering what snow is. A ferocious winter storm dropped over 30 inches of snow on parts of Massachusetts from Friday into Saturday. On Saturday, Boston reported snowfall of 2-4 inches per hour. To the south, portions of Long Island, New York, reported more than two feet of snow and blizzard conditions.
So, how does last weekend’s gigantic nor’easter, which dropped literally feet of snow on the U.S. eastern seaboard, fit into the global warming narrative?
Just fine, according to some climate scientists. A large weather event such as last weekend’s nor’easter — or bomb cyclone, if you prefer — jives just fine with global warming, especially when you consider the re-branding of global warming into the catch-all term “climate change.”
A Market Watch story written by Rachel Koning Beals explains, “This is global warming, actually.”
“Although climate change is expected to lower the amount of overall snow the U.S. receives on an annual basis, it’s going to increase the number of nor’easters we see annually, according to a recent report from the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research’s nonprofit arm, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, or UCAR,” the story states.
So, less snow overall but more frightening, dangerous, and intense weather? Got it.
The report cited by Market Watch claims that smaller storms dropping only a few inches will decline, while massive and potentially dangerous storms such as last weekend’s bomb cyclone will increase.
“What this research finds is almost all of the decrease in snow occurs in weaker, more nuisance-type events,” according to Colin Zarzycki, the author of the study cited by Market Watch. “The really crippling storms that have major regional impacts on transportation, on the economy, on infrastructure are not significantly mitigated in a warming climate.”
Isn’t that convenient for the climate alarmists? No matter what they predict in terms of snowfall or winter weather they can be right.
Still, it seems a bit counterintuitive to claim that climate change brought on by global warming will lead to stronger winter storms and even more snow, doesn’t it?
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano explains in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,
Predictions of less snow were ubiquitous by global warming scientists. But once that prediction failed to come true, the opposite of what they predicted instead became — what they expected. How did global warming scientists explain record snow after predicting less snow? Easy. More snow is now caused by global warming. “Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists” blared a UK Telegraph headline in 2009. The Financial Times tried to explain “Why global warming means … more snow” in 2012.
Morano concluded, “So no matter what happens, the activists can claim with confidence that the event was a predicted consequence of global warming. There is now no way to ever falsify global warming claims.”
All scientific testing requires falsifiability; without the ability to falsify those claims — it’s not science.
Even some of the most ardent climate-alarmist scientists have trouble toeing this particular climate-change stance. In 2019, one of the climate-change movement’s most highly regarded scientists, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, rebuked colleagues who were claiming that the polar vortex of that year was a consequence of global warming.
“Frankly, it is a stretch to make that link,” Trenberth told The Daily Caller. “There is always cold air over the Arctic in the polar night and the question is whether it sits there or breaks out,” Trenberth said. “So all this is in the realm of weather. Not climate.”
