The Right's Inability to Grasp Climate Change May Be Funny, But It's Also Very Dangerous

Climate change conspiracies are hardly new, but the so-called Snowpocalypse in Washington D.C. has returned them front-and-center to every single right-wing media outlet.


Fox News anchor smugly claimed that the record snow had not only buried people's cars -- it was also "burying" global warming theories. In a World Net Daily radio segment, someone joked that liberals would soon be claiming the snowfall -- and global warming -- was the Tea Party movement's fault. And the family of Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, built a six-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and topped it off with a sign that read, "Al Gore's New Home," before posting it on Facebook to the delight of climate change non-believers across the country. (From a commenter: "What if the D.C. tent cities became IGLOO cities?? The irony!" Bashing global warming and the homeless in one fell swoop -- classy.)


Of course, this completely ignores evidence that the last decade was the warmest ever on the meteorological record, and that while in the long-run we can expect winter squalls like the one that just ravaged the Beltway to be far more uncommon, in the meantime, all this snow may very well be the result of warmer air supercharged with moisture that will result in snowstorms rather than in torrential winter rains, as long as the temperature remains below freezing. In fact, precipitation of all kinds is up -- way up. A recent study by the U.S. Global Change Research Program found that levels of very high precipitation from Maine to D.C. rose by 67 percent from 1958 to 2007; the Midwest has seen a 30 percent increase. Global warming holds that weather of all sorts -- warm and cold -- will be extreme, as we trend to an overall hotter planet.

But facts don't get checks placed into your wallet by the oil companies.