Climate Alarmist Blames This Weekend's Blizzard On Global Warming

December 21st, 2009 12:28 PM

Climate Progress's Joe Romm says this weekend's blizzard that rocked the Eastern seaboard was caused by global warming.

That's right, folks: you can add winter storms to the neverending list of things Nobel Laureate Al Gore's bogeyman is now responsible for.

Of course this isn't at all surprising, for Romm blamed the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse on global warming.  

Potentially just as interesting was how Romm initially tried to downplay the severity of this storm in his article published Sunday:

As for the East Coast storm, my home in DC did get 18 inches of snow — although if this had been a true blizzard, I doubt my flight from Copenhagen on Saturday would have been allowed to land in Dulles airport and I wouldn’t of been able to get home 12 hours after I left Denmark. [...]

If having snow around the holidays on the East Coast were strange, I doubt the song “White Christmas” would have been written.

So, this WASN'T an extreme event? Not so fast:

The Capital Weather Gang reports that the DC snowstorm has set multiple records (previous in parentheses):

  • National: All-time December daily (11.5″, 12-17-1932) and monthly snowfall (16.2″, 1962)
  • Dulles: All-time December daily record (10.6″, 12-12-1982) and second highest December snowfall (24.2″, 1966)
  • Baltimore: All-time December daily (11.5″, 12-17-1932) and monthly snowfall (20.4″, 1966)

Interesting, wouldn't you agree? First he said, "Nothing to see here. Move along."

Then he showed actual data proving the weather event was historic.

Kind of like Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) claiming he voted for war funding before he voted against it!

But Romm wasn't done:

So it is inane for anyone in the media to cite this massive DC snowstorm as somehow counterintuitive or ironic against the backdrop of Obama’s Copenhagen deal.

In fact, this record-breaking snowstorm is pretty much precisely what climate science predicts. 

And therein lies the rub, for alarmists like Romm and the rest of his ilk have stacked the deck so that no matter what happens with the weather, it's caused by global warming:

  • Excessive heat
  • Excessive cold
  • Droughts
  • Floods
  • Warm winters
  • Cold winters
  • Hot summers
  • Cold summers
  • Autumns with great foliage colors
  • Autumns lacking foliage colors
  • Lack of snow
  • Abundance of snow

You name it, these charlatans blame it on global warming, and they want the media to comply:

I’m not say [sic] that the media should link every extreme weather event the way [New York Times columnist Andrew] Revkin did. But when we have “worst on record” type events, or 100-year floods — and especially ones that last more than a day and/or hit a broad area — then I think the reporter has an obligation to include the issue.

So, unless all weather events stay within ranges these folks consider "normal," it's evidence of global warming.

I guess this is why Romm's fellow scientists involved in ClimateGate did everything within their power to flatten out past temperature extremes so as to make more recent data APPEAR extreme.

Readers are highly encouraged to review Marc Sheppard's outstanding American Thinker piece on this very subject. 

The point here is that alarmists like Romm want everyone to believe that weather in the past was much less extreme than it is today so that they can blame anything supposedly out of the ordinary on global warming.

Which makes these people the Bernie Madoffs of climatology and meteorology. After all, the key to Madoff's successful Ponzi scheme was convincing new and existing investors that he was producing higher returns than he really was.

This is exactly what Romm and his ilk are doing: exaggerating current weather events while downplaying what happened in the past so as to convince the public it all correlates with the predictions emanating from their own climate models.

Of course, as Marc Sheppard proved, when proxies created by them don't fit the desired result, they just splice in other numbers that do -- just like Madoff did. But this is FAR worse, for these folks demand media assist them with the scam.

With this in mind, while press members jump on the left-wing's castigation of bankers and Wall Streeters as the scum of the earth, maybe they should set their sights on climate alarmists like Romm who are involved in a far more nefarious plot involving a far greater number of people.