With the weather being, shall we say, uncommon, for this region at this time of year, I’m hearing more and more comments from folks, both personally and in the media, questioning the validity of global warming/climate change, taking particular shots at one Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, former Senator, Vice President, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and ardent environmental activist.

This bugs me, not so much because people are making fun of a person I hold in high regard (and the guy’s admittedly easy to make fun of; he makes fun of himself pretty regularly), but because these people who think themselves so clever have the science of it so terribly wrong. It’s one more of those examples of people’s positions and beliefs being shaped more by emotional appeals (in this case, rampant anti-intellectualism and “anti-elitism”) than factual evidence that the BBC wrote about, and I pointed to a few posts ago.

In actual fact, the kind of weather events we’re experiencing today are, at least in part, a symptom of the disruption to weather patterns caused by large-scale changes in the global climate, rather than a refutation of the concept.

Once explained, the circumstances make a lot of sense. "Global Warming" refers not to it necessarily being "hotter" day to day, but rather to the average global temperature increasing a degree or two over decades. it’s not the kind of thing a person’s going to notice on the micro level, but can have significant effects on a planet-wide scale.

On the macro level, though, an increase in global temperatures has wide-ranging effects; a higher average temperature, over time, will, for example, cause things like glaciers and polar ice caps to become smaller, because the normal freeze-thaw cycle gets disrupted, and less water re-freezes over time.

All that unfrozen water’s got to go somewhere; and that somewhere is oceans, lakes, and other waterways. Sea levels are rising slightly, but that’s not really the issue yet. A lot of that excess water evaporates and ends up in the atmosphere. A more saturated atmosphere leads to more precipitation, and bigger, more powerful, unpredictable storm systems, including stronger hurricanes and big snow storms like we’ve been getting this year.

So, yeah, the kind of stoms we’re experiencing actually provide compelling scientific evidence for the idea of climate change, according to scientists, who’ve been warning about exactly this sort of thing for some time.

And, I know I’d rather trust the scientists at NOAA, the National Wildlife Federation and the Union of Concerned Scientists on the issue than the conservative contrarian talking heads.

…but then, even the Bush Administration agreed with the scientists on this one.

Maybe that’s something we should all be writing on our hands.