Josh First's Blog

Freak snow. Does it mean global climate change?

Global climate change, caused exclusively by humans and especially Western democracies, has been a cornerstone article of faith among the most outspoken environmental advocates.

No matter what the weather is, it’s always too extreme, too variable, too much of an outlier for the activists. Wild and even moderate swings in weather are proof of global warming, they constantly say.

If it’s unusually hot for a day, a week, a year, why that is obvious proof of global warming, they say.

If the weather turns prematurely cold or snowy, then that unusual deviation becomes yet another proof of global warming. After all, goes the thinking of the advocates, all unusual weather is evidence. Their first baseline is the past 100 years since weather data has been collected. Their second baseline is the past few hundred years of relatively stable weather patterns around the planet. The past couple of thousand years have seen several long periods of drought and wet, long before human populations either grew significantly or developed modern technology and industrial processes.

Their third baseline is the past ten thousand years, a period of relative calm when compared to the hundred-foot-thick glaciers that covered huge portions of Earth for thousands of years.

Yesterday we had an unusual October snow storm that left an inch or two of wet, heavy snow clinging to trees, buildings, light poles, and lawns. Could this be more evidence of global warming?

Let’s compare this snow to a mid-April snow storm I experienced on the first day of trout season in 1986, in central Pennsylvania. That day I was casting flies on Big Fishing Creek to hungry trout while enveloped in a white-out fog of swirling, blowing snow flakes. At that time, experts claimed the freak snowstorm was evidence of the mini ice age the planet was entering. Not global warming, but global cooling.

Twenty-five years later the global climate change claim is the opposite.

The problem with all this talk of global warming and cooling is that no matter what the weather is, unusually hot or unusually cold, certain advocates claim it is more proof for their current pet end-of-the-world issue. With all weather types and the full spectrum of weather now used to bolster the claim of global warming or climate change, it becomes an un-disprovable claim. All weather is “evidence.”. There is no weather that can be used to prove the opposite claim.

The biggest problem with “global climate change/warming/cooling” is that its advocates steer limited resources away from solving real environmental issues, like water pollution and profligate land development patterns.

I’m going to enjoy this unusual, pretty snow laying out on my lawn, because although it felt like the sky was falling, I rest happily knowing that it really isn’t.