Climate Change: cold equals warm

By Richard North - December 9, 2022

Unusually for this time of year, snow and ice warnings have been posted by the Met Office taking us to this Sunday, with the possibility of an extension well into next week.

Unsurprisingly, this coincides with low wind conditions throughout most of the country, leaving the National Grid struggling for power and contemplating “enhanced actions” to preserve supplies and avoid blackouts as wind power yet again fails to deliver.

And, although there have been no official reports, some private users have noticed that gas pressure is down and, in one outlying village in the Cotswolds, it dropped so low that it triggered safety cut-outs in most of the residents’ central heating boilers.

This is in addition to other incidents which have interrupted gas supplies, also leaving residents in the cold and at risk of electricity blackouts.

But if pre-Christmas snow – in England, at least – tends to be rare, at times like this we tend to be reminded of the famous article from March 2000, published in the Independent, that proclaimed “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”.

Now deleted by the embarrassed newspaper, it remains accessible from the Wayback Machine as a mute reminder that the internet never forgets.

The story itself, written by Independent hack Charles Onians, was based on the prediction of climate guru Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the temple of the warmist cult, the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.

Within a few years, Viner declared, winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”, adding that, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, he proclaimed.

With what might appear to be some prescience, though, he did remark that “heavy snow will return occasionally, but when it does, we will be unprepared”. In Viner’s view, “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years’ time”, he said. Nevertheless, the aura of prescience is somewhat diminished by the previous times snow has been experienced since this rash prediction.

But what is significant about the current Met Office warning is that we’re very far from being on our own. Over the last weeks, we’ve seen multiple reports of record snowfall in New York State, Northern California and Anchorage in the United States, spreading as far afield as Siberia, Japan and China, where Beijing experienced its lowest November temperatures since 1970.

By the end of November, the snow cover the Northern Hemisphere was so extensive that a 56-year-high was being recorded, the highest level since measurements began in 1967 by NOAA and Rutgers University, standing at over 41 million square kilometres.

This has evoked an expected wave of scepticism from the usual sources which has had the warmist “fact-checkers” springing to the defence of their creed.

Although they have been happy to zero on a few unusually warm days in the summer as evidence of global warming – or the “climate emergency”, as they now prefer to call it – they are expressing rooted objections to the cold spell being used to contradict the Chicken Little tendency.

Thus, we have AFP Fact Check note that social media posts have been claiming that record snow cover in the northern hemisphere in November 2022 is evidence against climate change.

Sternly, though, these protectors of public morals proclaim that “this is false”. Relying on the familiar device of citing house-trained “experts”, we are told that “a single month’s measurement does not disprove the overall global warming trend” and, in any case, data show snow extent varies and that cover has decreased.

Called in aid is Marie Dumont, director of France’s national Snow Research Centre, who told AFP on 29 November that, “Snow cover is very variable from one year to the next. A very snowy year does not mean that the heating of the climate has stopped”. She adds, “You can very well have a very snowy year in a context of a warming climate”.

According to la Dumont, “on average, according to the trends observed over several decades, there is an average decrease in snow cover” – but that “does not mean there is a decrease every year”.

Then we get selected excerpts from the Holy Scriptures, in the form of the pervasive mantra that “scientists agree” that carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels are causing climate change, heating the planet and raising the risk of disasters such as heatwaves, floods and droughts.

Then the High Priests of warmism are cited, no less than the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And since it has pronounced in its 2021 report that: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”, there can be no dispute.

Produced by hundreds of scientists in more than 60 countries, the IPCC’s reports are the most comprehensive source of scientific knowledge on the climate, says AFP. All is well with the world. The “climate emergency” has been preserved for mankind and the “Just Stop Oil” luvvies can continue blocking London traffic.

The only slight problem here is that, as we move into the second week of December, the cold weather has been intensifying – hence the recent reports of record snowfall in Anchorage – and the UK is poised to add to the record level of snowfall which is continuing in the United States and elsewhere.

Thus, we get AccuWeather meteorologist Bernie Rayno warning that another major winter storm is set to slam the Midwest next week, delivering everything from tornadoes to blizzards.

This Rayno says, “could wreak havoc on cross-country travel as well as pose a significant threat to lives and property”, who adds that: “The stage is being set for extreme weather conditions over the US next week, especially for the middle of the nation”.

IIn addition to that, we can expect “an all-out blizzard” in parts of Colorado, the Dakotas and northern Minnesota, with an expansive snow dump about to sweep 1,200 miles from Nebraska to Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. This, Rayno warns, is to be followed by another “burst of snow” across the Northeast as the weekend winds down.

Then, next week, he continues, the current models foresee a descending polar outbreak that packs quite a punch — at least the third such system of the season, with the first, and most notable, being the delivery of 6-plus feet to the likes of Buffalo back in November — an event that many described as one of – if not the – most powerful snowstorms in US history.

Of course, neither does this refute the Holy Scriptures of warmism. After all, this is only weather and, no matter how many people who are freezing, the warmists cannot be wrong.