Al Gore Explains Winter Snow To A Perplexed Bill O'Reilly

From Media Matters courtesy of Eschaton:

Last week on his show Bill O'Reilly asked, "Why has southern New York turned into the tundra?" and then said he had a call into me. I appreciate the question.

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:

"In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow."

A bit more here.

Anybody who's read anything at all about global warming understands that the climate change phenomenon is about average annual global temperatures, rather than what the weather's like outside your window at any given moment. I mean, you don't even really have to have read about global warming in order to understand this: if the weatherman gives you a 100% chance for rain tomorrow, but then it stops raining for an hour or two in the afternoon, this is not evidence that the field of meteorology is junk science; rather it means that this field deals with the big picture instead of excruciatingly specific minute-by-minute predictions.

Here's another way of looking at it. Asserting that a single snowstorm, or even fifty for that matter, contradicts the rising mountain of evidence that man-made global warming is somehow not a scientific fact is tantamount to saying that a few molecules worth of impurity in a gold ring makes it worthless.

I would say I'm surprised, but these are the same people who think cavemen walked the Earth alongside dinosaurs. When I was a kid, I used to think grownups are smart, just because age brings wisdom. Now I know that's bullshit.

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