Blizzards across the eastern U.S. have fired up the debate over climate change, the New York Times reported today. People skeptical of global warming found new evidence in the piles of snow, while advocates said the blizzards were clear evidence of a changing climate. The Times wrote that independent climate experts say the blizzards "no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is warming."
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said the storms "reinforced doubts about scientists' conclusion that global warming was 'unequivocal' and most likely caused by human activity," the Times wrote. Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators "made light of the fact that the announcement of the creation of a new federal climate service on Monday had to be conducted by conference call, rather than news conference, because the federal government was shuttered by the storm," wrote the newspaper.
Joseph Romm, a climate-change expert and former DOE official who writes about the issues at the Center for American Progress, was quoted as saying: "Ideologues in the Senate keep pushing the anti-scientific disinformation that big snowstorms are evidence against human-caused global warming." Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog, said that "both climate-change contrarians and climate-change scientists agree that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change. However, one can 'load the dice' in favor of events that used to be rare--or unheard of--if the climate is changing to a new state."
