Less than a decade after predicting climate change would lead to winters without snow, former Vice President Al Gore and other climate change activists say the recent cold snap is another clear sign of a “climate crisis” and media refuse to point out the contradictions.
Colder than normal temperatures hung around the Midwest and Northeast for weeks, exacerbated by stiff winds and even a bombogenesis of “bomb cyclone” along the east coast last week. However, for Gore and his allies, the stretch of frigid temperatures serves as further confirmation of the impact human activity is having on our world.
“It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis,” Gore tweeted.
However, researchers at Climate Depot point out that as recently as the year 2000, scientists had a far different expectation from climate change – then referred to as global warming. That year the UK Independent declared “snow is starting to disappear from our lives” and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”
Dr. Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, says Gore is scrambling now that his forecasts have proven wrong.
“In his 2006 documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ Al Gore said absolutely nothing about rising temperatures leading to colder winters,” said Cohen.
Cohen asserts that the the liberal narrative had to change once global temperatures failed to keep rising last decade. He says there are too many political and financial investments for the activists to turn back now.
“Because they were still interested in scaring us to death so that we would undertake steps to regulate ourselves and to mandate the use of renewable energy and to take other steps we otherwise wouldn’t do, they had to slap a new label on all of this. So out went ‘global warming’ and in came ‘climate change,'” said Cohen.
And with the new terminology came greater flexibility for climate change activists to steer reality to their narrative.
“Regardless of what happens – a tornado in Oklahoma, a hurricane that slams into Texas or Florida, a typhoon that churns up the Pacific or whatever – they are covered. ‘Aha, this is further proof of climate change,’ when in fact it’s proof of absolutely nothing other than the climate doing what the climate has always done,” said Cohen.
Now that the narrative is shifting, are the news media highlighting the very different statements from Gore and others over the years or simply giving them a platform for their latest contentions?
“They adopted this ‘extreme weather event’ explanation. We are somehow supposed to believe that we are experiencing extreme weather conditions that we have never experienced before.
“They are, in effect, giving cover to Gore and giving cover to the whole agenda. Of course, these people are every bit as ignorant of our climatological past, including our recent climatological past, as is Mr. Gore,” said Cohen.
And Cohen says the media, just like Gore, will keep the narrative going regardless of the evidence.
“You can count on all of these people still beating the drums of what is now called climate change simply because I think the mainstream media is too invested in this to admit that it has been taken to the cleaners by climate alarmists, who have an agenda which I assure you has nothing to do with the climate,” said Cohen.
“I don’t expect these people to undergo any change in their course whatsoever,” he added.
So what did happen during the cold snap?
“It’s evidence that it’s winter. This is something that we’ve all seen before. This was a combination of two things occurring simultaneously. One was a typical Nor’easter, that is a storm that made its way up the Atlantic coast.
“This one coincided with extremely cold weather which originated over land, namely Siberia, made its way on prevailing winds to North America and eventually to the Midwest, the Northeast, and even the Southeast as far south as North Florida,” said Cohen.
Cohen says history has recorded plenty of these storms, most notably the blizzard of 1888, which left snow drifts 50 feet high in New York City.
“Whatever may have been behind the storm of 1888 and similar storms which have occurred, I can tell you one thing that did not cause them: man-made emissions of greenhouse gases through the burning of the burning of fossil fuels, which is supposed to be behind all of this,” said Cohen.
