“Hopefully, winter will come back,” says Tim Gayda, a leader of the Olympic organizing committee.

WARNING:  This post contains the following brain-busting quote from a Vancouver Olympic official –  “We really shattered the all-time [temperature] record,” he said. “It’s El Ni±o, and there’s something else that nobody understands at this point. It’s El Ni±o Plus.”

In one of the greatest coincidences in human history, Vancouver just blew out its monthly temperature records a mere three years after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said warming in the climate system is unequivocal:

January temperatures were the warmest on record and the trend is continuing this month, says Environment Canada meteorologist Matt McDonald, one of 30 forecasters working the Winter Games.

This year, the average temperature in January was 44.9 degrees, besting the previous warm record of 43.3 in 2006 and well above the historic average of 37.9 degrees, according to Environment Canada weather data.

McDonald says the mild temperatures are expected to continue, and rain “” not snow “” is expected for much of the week.

This is the first time in history that Erickson Air-Crane’s “specially fitted Sikorsky S-64 has been hired to make it snow,” USA Today reported this week.  [The website Jalopnik is the source of the top picture and the headline.]

But no, we’re not going to calculate the carbon footprint of this effort.  Why should we?  It’s just a coincidence that it’s been so damn warm, right?

Everyone knows you can’t make a direct connection between carbon emissions and this January in Vancouver which is so damn warm it crushed the record set so long ago that toddlers can’t even remember it.  It’s just a coincidence that we are now in the warmest winter globally in the satellite record.

It’s just like that chain-smoking guy who got lung cancer.  The fact that he smoked two packs a day is a coincidence.  You can’t prove it — so keep smoking, already.  Sure the statistics show the warming footprint — Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S. — but individual events are just coincidence.  I’m telling you.

BUT this type of purely coincidental extremely warm weather is completely consistent with the predictions of climate science.  Indeed climate science says we are likely to see far, far worse, far, far more often.  So that means those crazy folks in other countries who don’t believe it’s all just a coincidence feel obliged to maybe, possibly do some thinking about what it all means for the Winter Olympics, as AFP reports:

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Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

This study came up on the press call.  The key point is that you can’t draw conclusions about the climate from any single weather event, but instead need to do statistical analyses across large regions to understand what is happening.

I blogged on this study 3 months ago, but when I mentioned it on the call, the journalist hadn’t heard about it.  It is timely to repost especially since I’ll be doing a lot of media in the next few days and sending people to this website.  Apologies to regular readers for the repetition, but you’re going to see more in the coming days as it’s increasingly we need to start over on explaining the science to the media and public.

And yes it is worth noting, as one reader did, that the study left out Alaska, the state where temperatures are rising the fastest.  Including it would likely have increased the trend.

Here is an explanation of the figure, followed by a video by the lead author discussing it:

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Economywide bill still top priority for utility companies

The association of the nation’s largest utilities will continue to pursue passage of an economywide bill to cut greenhouse gas emissions this year, the president of the Edison Electric Institute said yesterday.

Despite the partisan divide, EEI will continue its fight for legislation to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and limits price increases on customers, Tom Kuhn told financial investors and analysts in New York.

Kuhn stressed that congressional legislation is much preferred to rules set by U.S. EPA or state and local regulations.

“Only well-designed comprehensive climate legislation can contemplate economywide GHG emissions reductions within the context of the current and projected economic landscape, the availability of technology, the reliability of the nation’s power sector and the affordability of its energy supply,” Kuhn said in his “state of the industry” speech.

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Sarah Palin calls global warming studies “snake oil science.”

The anti-science hatemongers have redoubled their efforts, as guest blogger Brad Johnson reports in this pair of ThinkProgress reposts.

On his radio show yesterday, Fox News host Glenn Beck argued that the world’s climate scientists should commit suicide because they “have so dishonored themselves.” After repeating exaggerated and false smears about the work of the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international scientific and governmental body tasked with assessing the threat of global warming, Beck said “there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occured,” referring to the form of ritual suicide used by Japanese samurai:

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For the latest on climate science, see The year climate science caught up with what top scientists have been saying privately for years.  I’ll be doing more posts on the science soon.

Weather Underground’s Dr. Jeff Masters and I will discuss impacts of climate change on recent extreme weather events:

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Memo to New York Times: We are NOT in a Deep Freeze

People here because of the NYT link might want to start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress” and other “Most Popular Posts” on the sidebar.  My bio is here.

I’m featured in John Broder’s story, “Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze.“  Before getting to the story, I must comment once again on how a dreadful headline mars an otherwise fairly reasonable story for the NY Times.

We are not in a deep freeze.  Quite the reverse.

Let’s see.  The 2000s were easily the hottest decade on record (as NASA and  NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization report).  And 2009 was one of the hottest years on record — tied for second hottest in NASA’s dataset.  And we are now in the warmest winter globally, as I noted in my Monday post, “Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record “” and the deniers say it disproves (!) climate science.”

Heck, even over the tiny fraction of the planet’s surface that is the continental United States, NOAA just reported that January was “0.3 degrees above the long-term average” — notwithstanding the media coverage (and hype by the anti-science ideologues) that might have left you with the serious misimpression last month was unusually cold.

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Graph explaining how greenhouse gas pollution intensifies precipitation events, including snow storms, from Trenberth et al., 1999.

“Snowmageddon.” “Snowpocalypse.” “SnOMG.” These popular depictions of the record snowstorms that have crippled the Mid-Atlantic region demonstrate that the American public knows the weather is disastrously out of control. Instead of galvanizing Congress to take action to stop the manmade disruption of our climate, these storms are being used by Washington pundits to excuse inaction. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the chair of the Senate energy committee, is turning to these killer storms to justify his resistance to passing strong climate legislation, telling the Hill’s Alexander Bolton that “the blizzards that have shut down Congress have made it more difficult to argue that global warming is an imminent danger”:

It makes it more challenging for folks not taking time to review the scientific arguments. People see the world around them and they extrapolate. I think that it’s hard to see an economy-wide cap-and-trade [proposal] of the type that passed the House could prevail.

It’s bizarre that Bingaman can’t make the argument that killer weather is one of the most significant consequences of heating up the climate. Global warming deniers may repeat the fatuous argument that killer blizzards disprove global warming ad infinitum, but it doesn’t make their argument more compelling. Bingaman’s concession to anti-science ideology is suspiciously convenient, as he has been open to dropping comprehensive climate legislation in favor of his committee’s energy-only package.

In case Sen. Bingaman is interested in convincing his colleagues of the very real threat of killer weather fueled by global warming, he can start with the findings of Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States (Chagnon et al., 2006), which describes how snowstorms and climate warming are strongly correlated in the United States:

Results for the November–December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%– 80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years. Assessment of the January–February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%–80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March–April season 61%–80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal years. The relationship of storm incidence to precipitation in all three 2-month periods of the cold season showed that 61%– 85% of all storms occurred in wetter-than-normal years. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901–2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.

Now, following the warmest January on record, Washington DC has received record snowfall, breaking a record that stood for more than a century. “As of 2 PM today, with the 9.8 inch two-day snowfall total at National Airport, the seasonal snowfall total in Washington DC stands at 54.9 inches,” the National Weather Service reports. “This would break the previous all-time seasonal snowfall record for Washington DC of 54.4 inches set in the winter of 1898-99.”