So put down the Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on CNN/Faux News Kool-Aid and turn off the television, because regardless of the Bimbo Bottle Blonde Bobble Heads of the Mainstream Multi-Millionaire Media annual tradition of using snowstorms and cold temperatures to mock global warming, it’s winter!.
The suggestion that local winter weather somehow disproves global, long-term warming trends, a recurring theme in the media, is faulty logic. During the hot summer months, the media’s silence on global warming is deafening. But like clockwork, when the snow starts to accumulate so does climate coverage.
Meteorologist Jeff Masters writes:”
Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet. In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favor of more extreme storms in all seasons.”
A 2009 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program states:
… “strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent” in the Northeast and upper Midwest as a result of climate change.
It is snowing, heavily, in the Mid-West because it’s winter! It snows in the winter in the Mid-West. And with more moisture in the atmosphere it snows more. Just as here on The High Desert we see extremes – this time last year we had a pretty good snow pack at the higher elevations (more moisture, warmer air) and had had some snow and quite a bit of rain here at the lower elevations (4000 ft). Certainly nothing like the winters of my youth and not at all like today, with Bachelor the open skiable resort and it with barely enough to run, and The High Desert three weeks now under the highest high pressure ever recorded over Cascadia leaving us high and dry with forty-five to fifty degree days and twenties overnight and no concentration of moisture – rain or snow – in the fire zone.
And there is a very real likelihood it could stay that way through April.
We are, afterall, The High Desert.
