The hottest topics in weather today are the officially-named winter storms that are being covered as enthusiastically as hurricanes once were.
Winter storms Pandora, and the associated Siberian Express, are well-chronicled via social media.
The photos are amazing:
And so are the videos:
Tragically, however, over two dozen Americans have died as a result of the frigid weather.
…Nearly a week of cold and ice has contributed to 18 weather-related fatalities in Tennessee since Monday, according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. They include nine people who died of hypothermia and five victims of motor-vehicle accidents.And in Kentucky, 10 people have died since Monday in weather-related incidents, said Buddy Rogers, a spokesman for Kentucky Emergency Management.Pennsylvania authorities said Friday at least two people had frozen to death outside.A 119-year-old record low temperature for February 20 was broken in Washington, with a temperature of 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees Celsius) recorded at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Of course, official government spokesmen are touting the “global warming” scenario to explain this particularly deadly bout of “climate change”.
“Heavy snows mean the temperature is just below freezing, any cooler and the amount would be a lot less,” adds Kevin Trenberth, a climate expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Warmer waters off the coast help elevate winter temperatures and contribute to the greater snow amounts. This is how global warming plays a role.”Yes, it might sound strange, but it can actually snow more when it’s a bit warmer — not too warm for snow, of course, but not extremely cold, either.
For me, there are two troubling aspects to the story. The first is that those bureaucrats and politicos in power have admitted to using “global warming” as a tool to change the direction of human progress.
The term “climate” is typically associated with annual world-wide average temperature records measured over at least three decades. Yet global warming observed less than two decades after many scientists had predicted a global cooling crisis prompted the United Nations to organize an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to convene a continuing series of international conferences purportedly aimed at preventing an impending catastrophe. Virtually from the beginning, they had already attributed the “crisis” to human fossil-fuel carbon emissions.A remark from Maurice Strong, who organized the first U.N. Earth Climate Summit (1992) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil revealed the real goal: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse.”Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S undersecretary of state for global issues, addressing the same Rio Climate Summit audience, agreed: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Wirth now heads the U.N. Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.)Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department said: “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
The second is a bit more personal. Pope Francis is poised to issue an encyclical next month that touches on global warming. Fellow Catholic, physicist, and climate science activist, Dr. Martin Fricke, is also disturbed by what amounts to faith based science.
The misguided comments of our Holy Father, the beloved Pope Francis, about global warming have stirred things up even prior to his anticipated encyclical. The pope, as most know, has included the reduction of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) among the things crucially needed to help the poor, helping the poor having been his lifelong crusade. Unfortunately, he has been advised by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, specifically the Catholic Climate Covenant. In turn, the Covenant relies on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which uses the now fully discredited results of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC has predicted that rising levels of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere cause a “crisis” of increased global warming producing catastrophic damage worldwide. In fact, the global temperature has not changed for the past twenty years; and CO2 has been conclusively shown scientifically to have no effect on global warming.
Since Pope Francis is keen to help the poor, perhaps someone in his inner circle can inform him that warming is better for humanity and the needy suffer most during cold weather.
The Pope’s timing is almost as good as Al Gore’s: Winter Storm Quantum is on its way. I will be praying for the safety of those on the East Coast at Mass today.
(Featured Image – Via Twitter).
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