THE SNOW JOB OF CLIMATE CHANGE

As I was shoveling great gobs of it from my driveway this week, I remembered that Porter Fox, writing in the New York Times last February, predicted "the end of snow."

Last winter was the coldest on record for much of the country. At least a dozen cities reported more than twice as much snowfall as normal, AccuWeather said.

The record for "major impact" snowstorms in a decade on the East Coast, set in the 1960s, was 10. We’ve already had 14 such storms in this decade, noted meteorologist Joe D’Aleo.  Note that this decade is only half over.

One of those 14 was last weekend, mere days after EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said "climate change" could put an end to winter sports.

 "Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms," the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2001.

Winter snow cover in the northern hemisphere has been trending upward since 1969, according to the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University.

"Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled," wrote "environmental activist" Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Los Angeles Times in 2008.

A hop, skip and a jump from the Chestnut Hill estate where RFK Jr. did his sledding, nearly all HCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) stations in Maryland report receiving snow this January, roughly double the number in 2005.

Measurements taken by the 114 stations in the U.S. Climate Reference Network, established the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2005, indicate temperatures here have cooled about 0.4 degrees Celsius since then.

Children in Britain will grow up without knowing what snow is, Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, predicted in 2000.

"Four inches of snow to hit Britain this week," the London Daily Mail reported Jan. 25. This winter is expected to be the coldest in more than a century, the London Express reported last October.

"It’s just getting too hot for the Scottish ski industry," Dr. Viner said in 2004.

The ski season in Scotland opened early in 2012, was extended last year. In 2010, a popular resort closed because of too much snow.

It’s snowed this winter in LouisianaesFlorida (Sicily, Syria and Saudi Arabia, where it usually doesn’t.

2014 was "the warmest year in recorded history," said the New York Times, the AP, and many other news organizations. Since "recorded history" goes back thousands of years, this was a wild exaggeration. What they meant was 2014 was the warmest year since governments began keeping temperature records,

That goes back just to the 1880s, when we were emerging from the "Little Ice Age." In the last 10,000 years, 2014 was among the coldest 3 percent, ice core measurements indicate.

If 2014 were the warmest, it would be no big deal, because the alleged increase over the previous "warmest year (0.02 percent of a degree Celsius), is so much less than the margin of error (0.1 degree C) that "it’s not possible to definitively say which of several recent years was the warmest," said Britain’s Met(eorological) Office.

It wasn’t. The claim is based on surface temperature measurements, which exaggerate warming. According to satellite measurements (the most accurate), 2014 was tied for 3rd warmest year. The satellites show no statistically significant warming since 1998.

"In what universe does a temperature change too small for anyone to feel over a 50 year period become globally significant?" asked Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, who manages the satellite program.

What is significant – but unmentioned in news accounts – is the widening gulf between warming predicted by computer models and actual measurements, said Judith Curry, former chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.

To claim 2014 was the warmest year borders on scientific fraud, said astrophysicist Dr. David Whitehouse, former science editor for the BBC online.

Reporting on the claim was journalistic malpractice, wrote Robert Tracinski in the Federalist.

Had it been reported accurately, the lede would have been: "In the tiny little blip of geological time for which we have accurate surface temperature records, last year was pretty much the same as 2005 and 2010, continuing a plateau of global temperatures that has lasted nearly 20 years," he said.

Since they’ve been walked back, all that remains of the initial scary stories is "bluff, spin, and the uncritical press-release journalism that dominates mainstream reporting on the climate," Mr. Tracinski said.

2014 "may or may not be the hottest year ever, but is definitely in the running for the most dishonest year on record," he said. Warmism, or climate alarmism, has become the greatest snowjob in history.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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