You know that GOP Senator Inhofe, global warming denialist, had his family build an igloo after the recent storms out East to mock global warming. If you didn’t know, here’s the story:
Members of Inhofe’s family braved the historic snow storms crippling the nation’s capital and other northeastern cities to build a sizable igloo near the Washington National Mall in honor of the outspoken climate activist and former vice president.
Atop lies a sign at reads “AL GORE’S NEW HOME!” on one side and “HONK IF YOU [HEART] GLOBAL WARMING” on the other.
Funny joke, right? Ha ha. Those climate change alarmists, junk scientists and that serial liar Al Gore sure got it wrong, didn’t they.
But that’s not the last laugh …
You see Senator Inhofe (and all you other so-called “skeptics”), this is why they call it Climate Change (with two Capital C’s): guess who doesn’t have enough snow right now? Here’s a hint: its a place in Canada where lots of athletes are expected to suddenly appear this weekend to perform and be watched by billions of people worldwide:
Unseasonably warm weather has forced organizers to move hundreds of dump-truck loads of snow to Cypress Mountain ski resort from mountain valleys about 200 kilometers (124 miles) east of Vancouver.
“This has not been an easy challenge, but we are managing and making it work,” John Furlong, chief executive officer of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, or Vanoc, said yesterday at a press conference in Vancouver.
After Vancouver’s warmest January on record, Furlong and other officials have sought to put the snow shortage in perspective. The Vancouver Winter Games aren’t the first to face adverse weather, and Cypress is Vanoc’s only problematic venue, they said.
You see when the climate changes due to factors such as a man made carbon emissions that generate global warming (and its called Global (not regional) Warming for a reason) weird stuff happens. Stuff like monster snowstorms in the Mid-Atlantic region in February (but not in Western New York where I live thankfully), while in far northern latitudes the snowfall that usually appears every winter is unexpectedly missing in action. I’m sure the Vancouver Olympic Committee would pay good money to move the snow blanketing the East Coast to its mountains about now.
Somehow though, I don’t think Senator Exxon Inhofe from Oklahoma, infamous for calling global warming the greatest hoax of all time, is likely to notice that data regarding the earth’s changing climate is not the same thing as the local weather outside his grand kids’ house. Climate change scientists actually predicted that severe and unusual weather events were more likely to happen as the earth’s climate heats up. For example, the cycles of warming over the Eastern Pacific Ocean known as El Niño have been occurring more frequently and with a greater duration since 1975, in part because of a warming global climate.
El Niños have occurred more often since 1975, and measurements covering the last 120 years indicate that the duration of the 1990-95 El Niño was the longest on record.
Knutson and Manabe (1998) of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab, Princeton, concluded that the observed warming in the eastern tropical Pacific over the last decades is not likely a result of natural climate variability alone. It is more likely that a sustained thermal forcing, such as caused by the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, has been at least partly responsible for the observed warming over a broad triangular region in the Pacific Ocean associated with El Niño.
This suggests that human-induced climate change may be at least partly responsible for the relatively extreme character of the El Niño-related weather over the last few years in many parts of the world.
That’s from a report issued in September, 2000, a decade ago. Let me repeat that: A decade ago climate scientists were warning us that global warming was likely increasing the frequency of El Niño events and the severe weather with which they are associated.
This year a particularly intense and long lasting El Niño has been responsible for much of the bizarre weather in North America. What a surprise, eh? Amazing what climate science can do these days, at least when you disregard all the political bullshit hullabaloo designed to confuse the general public on the issue, and consider only the actual science involved.
Of course, anyone who has already made up their mind that global warming is not happening is unlikely to be swayed by the facts I’ve presented. We don’t like evidence that contradicts our biases, after all. But the truth is out there for all those people who deny climate change is occurring if only they would pull their heads out of their igloos to look.
