Obama enters snowy climate debate in Nevada

President Obama on Friday used an appearance in Nevada to address climate change and all the snow this year. He spoke at a town hall meeting while campaigning for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Here’s what Obama said during a lengthy response to a question about energy and climate policy:

First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody is like -- a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, see, look at that, there's all this snow on the ground, this doesn't mean anything.  I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn't mean that every place is getting warmer; it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer.  But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees, and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow.

The idea is, is that as the planet as a whole gets warmer, you start seeing changing weather patterns, and that creates more violent storm systems, more unpredictable weather.  So any single place might end up being warmer; another place might end up being a little bit cooler; there might end up being more precipitation in the air, more monsoons, more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more drought in some places, floods in other places.

So I just -- that's one aspect of the science that I think everybody should understand.