Climate change crowd struggles with counter-intuitive explanation for cold weather

Washington Times:

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi had a decidedly unscientific term for the effort to link Thursday’s frigid winter storm to human-caused climate change: “witchcraft.”

“This is flat out insanity and deception now,” Mr. Bastardi said Thursday in a tweet. “To tell the public that events that have occurred countless times before with no climate change attribution, is now just that, is not science, [it’s] witchcraft.”
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The winter blast unleashed snow, high winds and freezing temperatures on the eastern seaboard this week as it moved from the Southeast to New England, resulting in snowflakes as far south as northern Florida and a record cold snap in Boston.

The fierce storm also triggered a rash of climate-change sightings as activists moved to deflect wisecracks about “global cooling” by arguing that the bitter cold was actually consistent with a warming planet.
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Are such storms unusual? Not really.

“They happen every year,” said Roy Spencer, University of Alabama in Huntsville principal research scientist, on his Global Warming blog.

“Nor’easters do this sometimes,” Mr. Serreze said in an email. “This is certainly a strong nor’easter, but they have always been part of the picture and always will be. Maybe a warmer ocean is fostering more moisture in the air to help fuel such storms? Perhaps. But on the face of it, this is just a strong storm, and there is no need to invoke climate change.”

He added: “I experienced stronger ones when I was growing up in a small town in coastal Maine.”

Climate skeptics were quick to mock activists for connecting the winter freeze to global warming, pointing out that Mr. Gore as recently as 2009 warned of vanishing snow and ice.

“The media is intent on featuring every flood, hurricane, drought, tornado, heatwave — and now cold snaps and snowstorms — as proof of ‘global warming,’” said Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change” (Regnery, 2018).

“Never mind that the media used to claim that the polar vortex was a sign of global cooling back in the 1970s,” Mr. Morano said in an email. “Never mind that climate activists warned repeatedly that snow would be a thing of the past due to ‘global warming.’”
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This is coming from some of the same people who were last week saying that weather was not climate change when there was a cold front dropping snow on the south.  But when the weather is not they also say that it is "the new normal."  The true believers of climate change claim that whether it is hot or cold wet or dry it is evidence of climate change. But their climate models do more consistently predict warmer weather.  I think there are more reasons to doubt those models.