Pity the poor global warming alarmists such as Al Gore, James Hansen of NASA, and the Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen. They went way out on the limb in promoting the absolute certainity of global warming and now Mother Nature is sawing it off behind them with the coldest weather in decades. To spare themselves complete embarrassment, you might have noticed that many media outlets and global warming promoters are backing off from that term and are now using "climate change" more frequently. Last Friday, one of the big global warming promoters on the Huffington Post, Kevin Grandia, publicly struggled over whether to replace the older phrase with "climate change":

Is it more appropriate to use the term "global warming" or "climate change"?

Of course, like anything, it's complicated. For a bit of history lesson on the terms there is a great post on the NASA Global Climate Change blog.

Who says there aren't some positive side-effects to a slowing economy?

I'd say this one, as reported by the Washington Post's "Capital Weather Gang" blog, qualifies:

NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the entire staff of the "Forecast Earth" environmental program .....

The layoffs totaled about 10 percent of the workforce, and are among the first major changes made since NBC completed its purchase of the venerable weather network in September.

..... The timing of the Forecast Earth cancellation was ironic, since it came in the middle of NBC's "Green Week," during which the network has been touting its environmental coverage across all of its platforms. Forecast Earth normally aired on weekends, but its presumed last episode was shown on a weekday due to the environmentally-oriented week.

The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen says one of the steps to fight global warming is using images to affect people's outlook.

At the "Covering a Changing Climate: The Media Challenge" forum held at Harvard University in Boston, Mass. on April 30, Cullen suggested using Weather.com and Google Earth to add visual elements to promote the cause.

"[I] split my time between The Weather Channel and this think tank in Princeton and one of the things we've been trying to do is work with Google Earth essentially. And for me, coming from The Weather Channel, the most powerful tool that exists is Weather.com and you type in your zip code and you get a forecast out five days."