Washington to plunge more than 12 degrees below zero ....

.....first time in March since 1873. Another inconvenient truth.

Dear EarthTalk: Don’t all these huge snow and ice storms across the country mean that the globe isn’t really warming? I've never seen such a winter!
-- Mark Franklin, Helena, MT

On the surface it certainly can appear that way. But just because some of us are suffering through a particularly cold and snowy winter doesn’t refute the fact that the globe is warming as we continue to pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. And the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA) reports that recent decades have been the warmest since at least around 1000 AD, and that the warming we’ve seen since the late 19th century is unprecedented over the last 1,000 years.

“You can’t tell much about the climate or where it’s headed by focusing on a particularly frigid day, or season, or year, even,” writes Eoin O’Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor. “It’s all in the long-term trends,” concurs Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Most scientists agree that we need to differentiate between weather and climate. The NOAA defines climate as the average of weather over at least a 30-year period. So periodic aberrations—like the harsh winter storms ravaging the Southeast and other parts of the country this winter—do not call the science of human-induced global warming into question.

The flip side of the question, of course, is whether global warming is at least partly to blame for especially harsh winter weather. As we pointed out in a recent EarthTalk column, warmer temperatures in the winter of 2006 caused Lake Erie to not freeze for the first time in its history. This actually led to increased snowfalls because more evaporating water from the lake was available for precipitation.

But while more extreme weather events of all kinds—from snowstorms to hurricanes to droughts—are likely side effects of a climate in transition, most scientists maintain that any year-to-year variation in weather cannot be linked directly to either a warming or cooling climate.

Even most global warming skeptics agree that a specific cold snap or freak storm doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not the climate problem is real. One such skeptic, Jimmy Hogan of the Rational Environmentalist website writes, “If we are throwing out anecdotal evidence that refutes global warming we must at the same time throw out anecdotal evidence that supports it.” He cites environmental groups holding up Hurricane Katrina as proof of global warming as one example of the latter.

 Remember Al Gore's words: We will have to tell our grand children how snow looked. lol!!!!

The alarmists still have not come forward with an explanation why earth's temperature dropped between 1945 and 1976, while CO2 rapidly increase due to the industrialization of the western world and the primary (if not the only) energy source was coal. Many scientist in '75 and '76 even predicted a new ice age. 

"National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA) reports that recent decades have been the warmest since at least around 1000 AD" ... that was the so called medieval warm period, a time when the Vikings were farming in Greenland and grapes and wine were produced in Scotland.... and CO2 had nothing to do with this. So, what was responsible for that?

The polar cap over the Arctic has recovered the last 2 years and is currently back to previous coverage, and deeper in many places than previously.

There is IMHO a far more urgent problem/challenge the world and that is to find alternative energy sources. The North Sea is almost depleted of oil and the Arabs are urgently looking for new oil resources. Earth is running out of oil. Gas will see us through for the next 100 years, but what then?

None of the proposed alternatives are viable for 24/7/365. Photovoltaics is a non starter while windfarms only operates in a narrow window (must be shut down during strong winds and fail to produce power when there is no wind or a buildup of snow has accumulated on the blades during a snow storm) They can therefore not reliably sustain a grid.

Nuclear is also not a long term solution because no safe answer has so far been found for discarding (storing) their waste products.

It is common knowledge that the IPCC is just an extension of a political biased UN and no serious attention should be given to their recommendations. I suspect they will however intensify their lies because the US will become within the next 5 years independant of imported oil supplies (bye-bye Arabs!) and with their massive gas reserves become a nett exporter of energy.