Global Warming Cools Off

We’re having an early, unseasonably cold fall here in Minnesota. But don’t worry–it’s all because of global warming. At least that’s what a widely-circulated Reuters report claims.
Non-Minnesotans may not recognize this photo, but it’s Lake Superior in winter, with the lake mostly frozen but for the southwestern edge adjoining Duluth.

The global warming theory has been taking a beating lately, so Reuters is trying to rally the troops by reporting that “researchers have predicted that, as the climate gets warmer overall, it could mean colder temperatures in some parts of the world and more severe weather in general as weather patterns change.”
Worse yet, “Global warming means more snow, not less, for the snowbound region along the eastern border between Canada and the United States, researchers said on November 4, 2003. [A] study of snowfall records in the Great Lakes region and elsewhere suggests there has been a significant increase in snowfall in the Great Lakes region since the 1930s but not anywhere else.”
Wonderful. Global warming makes Minnesota colder and snowier. This reminds me of an incident a few years ago when a team of researchers went to Greenland in search of evidence of global warming. They were going to drill down into the ice pack and measure the accretion of ice year by year. They said they expected to find that in modern times, the ice “rings” have gotten smaller as the climate has warmed. They went to Greenland, measured the ice and found that the rings were getting thicker rather than thinner. So they issued a report saying that thicker ice rings were evidence of global warming because warmer weather leads to more snow. Which led one critic to wonder: If thicker rings and thinner rings are both evidence of global warming, why bother to go to Greenland at all?
This isn’t science, folks.