During the Northern hemisphere’s winter months, our friends in the eastern half of the US, northern India and China endured severely cold weather and cruel snowstorms.

Many Americans repeatedly awoke to record breaking low temperatures – in fact temperatures lingered around 15 degrees below the norm.  The wrath of cold arctic air dipped further south this year, sending residents of tropical Florida frantically rummaging through their attics in search of gear normally reserved for ski trips and Halloween costumes.

Areas throughout the UK dealt with weather noticeably more harsh than usual.  London experienced a cold snap, as severe as any other during the past thirty years.

In China, the government ordered schools closed and pulled citizens away from their every day vocations in order to gather enough man-power to clear snow that had shut down highways and airports.

What does all this cold weather mean in regards to global warming and climate change policy?

Most of us remember our primary school lessons discussing the difference between weather and climate, so we hopefully recall that cold weather on any given day, or series of days, does not mean an end to global warming or perverse science.

Unfortunately this lesson has been forgotten, or eagerly overlooked by many journalists and government representatives.  Typically a space reserved for conspiracy theorists and a growing slew of evangelical and right-wing bloggers, many participants in mainstream media and representatives in the US Congress interpreted the bitterness of a cold winter morning as evidence that successfully postulates the global warming hoax.

This divorce from commonsense by high level officials is best exemplified by the actions of a Senator from Oklahoma, who decided to voice his doubts in climate change science by building an igloo in Washington DC with a big sign posted on the top reading “Al Gore’s New Home.”

How can the climate/energy debate in the United States remain legitimate and productive when deniers have claimed victory by presence of snow and ice?

Unfortunately, evidence suggests, it can’t.

The strangely dubious combination of cold temperature records and politicians turned proselytizers in advance of an upcoming election year, has proved potent enough to derail the American government’s approach to mitigating climate change.  During the months of January and February, the climate change debate came to a screeching halt in the US.  There were even strongly worded suggestions from leaders within the Democratic Party that Obama pull emission trading off the climate change bill.

It appeared that we had arrived at a point where the most well studied, most critiqued scientific theory, upheld by over 30 years of dedicated research and supported by every major scientific body in the world, has been outweighed by a cold winter symbolized by the presence of an igloo adjacent to Capitol Hill.

So how do scientists explain the bitterly cold weather in context of an overall warming trend in the earth’s climate system?

Scientists at NASA were chomping at the bit to get their hands on atmospheric temperature data.  At their first glimpse of data gathered by satellites in the lower troposphere, they realized Mother Nature has a sick sense of irony.  January was a warm month – actually the third warmest month as recorded by the satellites in this data-set. Yet a few cold pockets hovered over certain sections of the globe.

These cold-air pockets were stationed precisely over the heads of the world’s most influential climate change decision makers and the most intensely media covered space of the climate change debate—the eastern US, most of Europe and China. The satellite data explicitly validate the weather versus climate change delineation we all learned in primary school. Click here to see the temperature distribution in the lower troposphere during the month of January.

What will spring bring?

During the month of March the cold-weather argument seemed to fade from dialogue in climate and energy policy forums.  Does this mean policy makers and overzealous members of the American media have learnt important lessons from this experience?  Or has the snow simply thawed?

As early spring began to defrost frozen lakes in the Mid-West and sidewalks in the northeast and Floridians regained their bronze tans, the draft of a new climate change bill made its way around industry and environmental lobbyists on Capitol Hill.  Surprisingly, reactions from both camps have been that of a cautious thumbs up.  So, perhaps primary school textbooks aren’t exactly correct and require a caveat.  There seems to exist some correlation between local weather (particularly in Washington DC) and the climate (issue not system) – not a scientific correlation, but one politically engineered.