Throughout the harsh winter of 2015, news media and TV talk shows continued to connect global warming and “manmade climate change” to blizzards and snowstorms, in spite of scientific disagreement.
Leading up to the latest snowstorm, the media doubled down on the assertion they have making for months that even winter weather can be blamed on climate change.
Washington Post reporter Chris Mooney claimed [1] on March 3 that global warming could have changed atmospheric circulation.
“And this is precisely what some researchers have proposed as the reason why we’re getting these crazy winters,” Mooney said in a story that also attacked Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. The Post had already labeled Inhofe a “national embarrassment” for his skeptical views about global warming and Mooney repeated it.
The same day, The Weather Channel said [2] that a “backyard filled with snow doesn't disprove climate change,” nor did winter weather discredit the claim by NOAA and NASA that 2014 was the hottest year on record [3]. “The reverse is true,” the article claimed. In reality, NASA and NOAA’s own data disproved their claim [4] that 2014 was the hottest year on record and had already taken heat from scientists over it.
Weather isn’t climate. That’s what climate alarmists say until it becomes convenient to their argument, of course. It wasn’t that long ago the media warned global warming would mean “the end of snow.” [5]
These days the cold and snowy winds have prompted a chorus of snow is “evidence” of climate change claims.
MSNBC host Ed Schultz was one of those voices. On The Ed Show March 2, he declared, “Every day we are getting new evidence of the effects of manmade climate change. Today, the Northeast, Plains and lower Midwest are digging out from another round of snow and freezing rain.”
MSNBC hosts and guests in particular have repeatedly stressed that climate change has contributed to this winter.
After a blizzard struck Buffalo, New York, “Science Guy” Bill Nye (who is not a climate scientist) argued that climate change worsened the storm during MSNBC’s The Cycle Nov. 20, 2014.
“It's very reasonable that it’s climate change. Everybody, when Lake Erie's warmer, more water evaporates into the air and snows more. I don't make the rules, people,” Nye said.
At least five different shows on MSNBC Jan. 26, mentioned [6] that climate change may have been a contributing factor to a blizzard that slammed the Northeast.
In a Feb. 16, interview discussing recent winter storms, Nye pushed MSNBC anchor Joy Reid to connect everything to “climate change.”
He said on The Reid Report that his “dream” was “that you all, you and the news business would just say the word climate change. Just like, ‘It could be climate change.’ ‘It's a possible connection to climate change.’ ‘Is this evidence of climate change?’ Could you just toss that in now and then?”
Other networks and media personalities have made the same claims.
On Feb. 23, NBC News’ Today weather and feature anchor Al Roker told [7] host Larry King during Ora TV’s “Larry King Now” that climate change was contributing to extreme weather across the country, including recent “brutal temperatures” and snowfall.
King asked Roker, “Is this [winter weather] all part of climate change?” Roker responded, “I think it is.”
Actors and actresses discussed the relationship between winter weather and climate change on Feb. 17, on ABC’s The View. Co-host Rosie Perez claimed that “the scientists are saying that climate change is real and part of the reason why we have so much more rain and snowfall is because what happens is when the temperatures changed in the oceans, the evaporation increases, and so you have all this condensation just held up into the sky.”
View guest and General Hospital actor Ryan Paevey then said the seeming contradiction between having “one of the warmest winters on record” and the “polar vortex” in parts of the country “might be some indication that climate change is real.”
But some scientists dispute the media’s claims. Climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels and environmental scientist Chip Knappenberger of Cato Institute summarized [8] the findings from a peer-reviewed study they published on temperature and snowfall. They said their results showed that “the temperature/snowfall relationship along the entire Atlantic coast of the U.S. is negative—on average, the warmer it is, the less it snows. “
As for the severe cold, even The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang acknowledged [9] a year ago, in an article Feb. 20, 2014, that five “preeminent climate scientists (John Wallace, Isaac Held, David Thompson, Kevin Trenberth, and John Walsh)” had published a letter in Science Magazine [10] contradicting a link between climate change and “bone-chilling cold.”
“It’s an interesting idea, but alternative observational analyses and simulations with climate models have not confirmed the hypothesis, and we do not view the theoretical arguments underlying it as compelling,” the scientists said. They also noted they all agreed “that human induced-induced global warming is happening.”