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Is Al Gore wrong on the environment? IPCC says global warming is NOT to blame for snow

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Al Gore took to his blog earlier this month to respond to Bill O’Reilly’s question: “Why has southern New York turned into the tundra?”

Gore happily typed away, blaming global warming for the snow and quoting Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page as his scientific authority.

“As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming,” Gore wrote.

Unfortunately for Gore and others who have claimed that the snow this winter is a global warming byproduct, their own authorities have said climate change will result in less snow.

Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have predicted warmer, less snowy winters.

A sampling:

  • “Snow season length and snow depth are very likely to decrease in most of North America … except in the northernmost part of Canada where maximum snow depth is likely to increase (Christensen et al., 2007).” (EPA)
  • “Decreases in snowcover and increases in winter rain on bare soil will likely lengthen the erosion season and enhance erosion intensity.” (EPA)
  • “Rising temperatures have generally resulted in rain rather than snow in locations and seasons where climatological average temperatures for 1961 to 1990 were close to freezing (0 °C).” (EPA)
  • “As temperatures rise, the likelihood of precipitation falling as rain rather than snow increases, especially in autumn and spring at the beginning and end of the snow season, and in areas where temperatures are near freezing. Such changes are observed in many places, especially over land in middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, leading to increased rains but reduced snowpacks.” (IPCC)

Some, such as University of East Anglia senior climate researcher, Dr. David Viner, have said that in a few years snow will be scarce, and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

So which global warming alarmists are we to believe?

According to skeptics of global warming, such rhetorical shifts show that predictions are not coming to fruition.

Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute, told The Daily Caller that since the IPCC is considered the “holy writ” by a majority of global warming alarmists, the IPCC is the place to look to see if predictions sync with data.

“Al Gore is not a scientist … He’s made a lot of money by whipping up scares and frightening children, but he is no longer heeded by anyone who takes this matter seriously. The IPCC is the scientific authority of his side of the case, and it says very plainly you get fewer extreme cold and fewer heavy snow events. That’s what the IPCC says, and if that’s what the IPCC says, then Al Gore has no business trying to say the opposite.”

Meteorologist Art Horn told TheDC that one of the big mistakes people are making is to confuse weather with climate. A couple of snow storms no more disprove global warming than a really hot day confirms the theory.

“Weather is what we wake up to everyday. Climate is the average of weather over a long period of time … So it makes no sense to try to say that a storm, or storms, or hurricanes are from global warming. You cannot say that because what we have seen through history is that the variability of weather is so enormous that there is no comparison.”

So folks, strap on your snow boots, endure the cold, but don’t try to draw conclusions from what you see when you look out the window.