By Janet Redman
Freak snowstorms plunged the nation's capital and the rest of the mid-Atlantic United States into utter chaos in February. The federal government shut down for nearly a week, many schools turned President's Day into an unexpected 10-day-long "snowcation," public transportation ground to a screeching halt, and suburban power outages drove some families to burn furniture in their fireplaces to keep warm.
Don't get me wrong. I love snow. While my neighbors were snatching every last gallon of milk and loaf of bread from our local grocery store, I was feverishly hunting down a decent sled. In fact, ever since I moved down to Washington, DC from Maine, I've been longing for a snow-packed winter like this one.
But for all the fun I've had cross-country skiing down city sidewalks and pegging strangers in spontaneous snowball fights, the recent extreme weather may prove to be snow-pocalyptic for climate change legislation.
I wasn't terribly surprised when Fox News played clip after clip of gale-force whiteouts, asking where global warming had gone. It didn't faze me when Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative South Carolina Republican, tweeted that "it's going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries 'uncle.'" But I was solidly disappointed when Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who serves as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and who floated his own climate bill last year, was quoted saying that "the blizzards ... have made it more difficult to argue that global warming is an imminent danger."
Granted, Bingaman is no champion of progressive climate politics. He's pushing nuclear power as "clean" energy even though the industry can't figure out how to safely dispose of the radioactive waste. He's also been publicly open to dropping a comprehensive climate bill in favor of energy-only legislation this year. But still, it's downright irresponsible for policymakers to downplay a truth that they themselves are all too familiar with.
A one-time weather event, no matter how odd it might seem to those of us living through it, is still a one-time event. The fact that it was cold and snowy for six days on the eastern seaboard in February doesn't refute a trend of rising global temperatures. Especially since Mainers were looking at our record snowfall with envy. And in British Columbia, the Vancouver Organizing Committee had to truck snow in from higher elevations so the Winter Olympics could go on as scheduled.
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