Snow job

My wife and I managed to return to the Washington DC area this morning just behind the two feet of snow that fell over the weekend and just ahead of another storm that’s expected to produce a foot-and-a-half of snow. Earlier last week, the area apparently got half a foot of snow. This followed a comparable snowfall two days before we left,
Throw in the nearly two feet that landed here on a mid-December weekend and, if we in fact receive a substantial accumulation tonight, this will become the snowiest winter ever recorded in Washington (records have been kept here since 1884).
This development tells us nothing about whether or to what extent the earth’s climate is changing. But it does make Robert F. Kennedy look rather foolish. As David Freddoso reminds us, 15 months ago Kennedy argued, in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, that snow had become virtually obsolete in the DC area. According to RFK Jr., “snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled; but neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.”
The nostalgia portion of this statement conflicts with my recollection of Washington area weather and, more importantly, with the data. If Kennedy’s memory were right, it’s not likely that we’d be on the verge of setting a record for snowfall this year. Apparently, the Los Angeles Times was so dazzled by images of John F. Kennedy and his brother Bob frolicking in the snow that it neglected to fact check RFK Jr.’s remembrance of things past.
Freddoso concludes that Kennedy “should leave weather analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change.” Unfortunately, though, Climategate has shown that some meteorologists are no more reliable than the hysterical Hickory Hill heir.