Romm responds to climate skeptics

Advocates for climate legislation don’t want their cause to get buried along with everything else by the record levels of snowfall in Washington.

Climate skeptics have used Snowpocalyse/Snowmageddon to poke fun at the notion that the planet is warming. But skeptics are only using the snow to obfuscate overwhelming evidence that the world is, in fact, heating up, according to Joe Romm, a former Energy Department official and author of the Climate Progress blog.

“An individual weather event is not climate,” Romm said during a conference call with reporters that was organized by the Center for American Progress to fire back at global warming doubters.

Romm was joined on the conference call by Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground. Masters called the storms “truly extraordinary.”

But they reflect higher levels of moisture in the air – which can be a consequence of global warming – not necessarily colder temperatures. Moisture and temperatures below freezing equals snow.

One reporter noted that the recent storms broke a record for snowfall set in 1888-89, before carbon dioxide emitting cars were even on the road.
There must have been moisture in the air then, right?

Masters responded by saying that global warming is based in part of “inadequate” data. But he said the risks were too great to ignore evidence that suggests the planet is getting hotter due to human activity.

Climate change must be measured in decades, not seasons or even years, he said.

Romm pointed out the last decade was the warmest on record, which broke a record that had been set the decade before. Still, he said it will be a "challenge" to pass a climate bill through Congress this year, given the 60-vote bar. But said he hoped the science behind global warming would push lawmakers to act.