There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.
But there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, the intensity of those storms has increased. That’s in part because of global warming — hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall.
Excellent! Then these clowns can point to all those heavy-hitting snowfall amounts in North Carolina over the last 50 years!
Climate models also suggest that while global warming may not make hurricanes more common, it could well intensify the storms that do occur and make them more destructive.
So first global cooling, then global warming, then to climate change, then to hurricanes in the aftermath of Katrina, and now snowfall is the new global warming trend — before or after we fudge the data, which is totally irrelevant when political principle is on the line, right?
Of course, outliers such as these are precisely that — anomalies that should have no real impact on science or policy. When millions of dollars of research funding is on the line in a tough economy… well, a little bit of emotive doesn’t hurt us peasantry one bit.
When alarmism sells, when principles are held without reason, and when an undereducated and overtitled populace is easily swayed… well, anything can be sold to people saturated in a materialist ethic.