How does more snow equal global warming?
Article published on GlobalPost.com on February 11, 2010.
by Tim Fitzsimons
BOSTON — You may not have heard of “Climategate” or the “hockey stick controversy.” But that doesn’t mean you haven’t found yourself thinking like a climate change skeptic lately.
Perhaps you’re reading from Washington, D.C., marooned at home by a second consecutive blizzard. Or maybe you’re in Scotland, which just recorded its coldest winter in more than a century. Maybe you’re just a little too cold to feel like the world is getting warmer.
"There’s nothing like a very cold winter to convince another percentage of the American public that global warming is not happening,” said American University professor Matthew Nisbet at Harvard University this week.
Indeed, the Republican Party in Virginia seized on the mid-Atlantic “snowpocalypse” to produce an advertisement criticizing Democrats in Congress who support "cap-and-trade" policies that provide economic incentives to reduce pollution emissions.
The ad advises viewers to call their representative and “tell them how much global warming you get this weekend. Maybe they’ll come help you shovel.”
(The ad has since been pulled from YouTube, possibly because of the highly negative coverage it generated.)
But weather hasn’t been the only thing raining on the climate change parade. A long list of setbacks have fanned the flames of climate gloom since the breakout 2006 Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” energized public attention toward the issue.
As China rose earlier than expected as the world’s top CO2 emitter, followed by a worldwide economic downturn, fewer people list climate change as a top priority.
Throw in the failure of the Copenhagen talks to produce a substantial climate agreement. The percentage of people worldwide who doubt the research backing climate change continues to grow.
Why such a change in the climate of public opinion?
