Climate experts answer skeptics: Snows no proof
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WASHINGTON -- As millions of people along the East Coast hole up in their snowbound homes, the two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments.
Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change -- this looks more like global cooling, they taunt.
Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.
But some independent climate experts say the blizzards in the Northeast no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is warming.
Illustrating their point of view, the family of Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a leading climate skeptic in Congress, built a 6-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and put a cardboard sign atop that read "Al Gore's New Home." The extreme weather, Mr. Inhofe said by e-mail, reinforced doubts about scientists' conclusion that global warming was "unequivocal" and most likely caused by human activity.
Nonsense, climate-change expert Joseph Romm, a former Energy Department official, wrote Wednesday for the liberal Center for American Progress. "Ideologues in the Senate keep pushing the anti-scientific disinformation that big snowstorms are evidence against human-caused global warming," Dr. Romm said.
It is perhaps not coincidental that the snowstorm scuffle is playing out against a background of recent climate controversies: In recent months, global-warming critics have assailed a 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and claimed that e-mails and documents plucked from a server at a British climate research center raise doubts about the academic integrity of some climate scientists.
First Published February 11, 2010 12:00 am
