As global warming from unlimited fossil fuel burning accelerates, the Arctic is being radically transformed. This winter saw large regions of Canada and Greenland about 10°C (about 15-20°F) above the historical average. Temperatures in eastern Canada in the dead of winter were a staggering 21°C (37.8°F) above average. The extreme Arctic warming is wreaking havoc with the polar ecosystems and is linked to the catastrophic snowstorms that pummeled the United States. In a summary of how global climate change is becoming observable to people in their daily lives, NASA scientist James Hansen was forced to redraw his global map with hot pink:

The temperature anomaly in the Arctic — the amount that current temperatures differ from historical norms — is now so severe that NASA’s James Hansen had to add a new color to his charts in order to accurately depict it: Hot pink.

“One sure bet is that this decade will be the warmest in history,” Hansen writes in his survey. Globally, extreme summer temperatures are becoming even more pervasive than warmer winters. “If people cannot recognize that summers are becoming more extreme they may need to have their senses examined or their memories.”

This is not the first time climate change has broken through scientists’ temperature scales. Updating from 2002 to 2009, MIT scientists were forced to add new colors to their “Greenhouse Gamble” roulette wheels for projected future warming.

(HT Climate Sight)

As epic floods fueled by global warming pollution ravage the globe from Australia to Brazil, from Sri Lanka to Germany — following the hottest and wettest year in recorded history — the traditional media is beginning to notice. ABC News described the consequences of humanity’s abuse of fossil fuels in two segments yesterday, interviewing Dr. Richard Somerville, the Nobel-winning scientist who led the IPCC report on the state of climate science in 2007:

This is no longer something that’s theory or conjecture or something that comes out of computer models. We’re observing the climate changing. It’s real. It’s happening. It’s scientific fact.

On ABC World News, anchor Diane Sawyer explained that “the evidence is in”: the energy trapped in our air and oceans by billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution is the reason “why we’re reeling from the deadly weather extremes,” including record one-day snowfalls in Hartford, CT, and Albany, NY:

Later on Nightline, anchor Cynthia McFadden introduced Jeffrey Kofman, who described acts of heroism and “apocalyptic” devastation in a “grim week of floods around the world, floods of, well, biblical proportion” that are “washing away entire cities”:

Linsey Davis ended her segment on ABC World News with the warning, “Many scientists say the forecast is looking more and more extreme.”

Meanwhile, the polluter takeover of Washington continues, with Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) the latest to announce an all-out assault on the Obama administration’s efforts to protect the nation from carbon pollution.

Matt Dempsey, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s communications director

After Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) family mocked Al Gore by building an igloo in snow-crippled Washington, DC, the Wonk Room had some questions for Matthew Dempsey, the communications director for the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. In an email exchange that took place on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 10th, Dempsey decided to deflect our questions with his own:

WONK ROOM: Does Sen. Inhofe believe that the disastrous weather that is shutting down the federal government raises the sense of urgency about addressing climate change?

DEMPSEY: Brad – thanks for your email. Are you suggesting this blizzard is a result of global warming?

WONK ROOM: I’m just asking whether Inhofe believes that these killer storms raise the sense of urgency about reducing the risk of climate change.

DEMPSEY: Thanks – it sounds like you are attributing the blizzard to global warming (or if you prefer, “climate change”), is that correct?

WONK ROOM: I believe the climate system is deterministic. Global warming, climate change, take your pick. Is my question unclear?

DEMPSEY: You haven’t answered my question yet, do you believe this blizzard is the result of global warming?

WONK ROOM: I asked you first.

But because you asked nicely, I believe that the climate system is deterministic — in other words, particular weather events are unique instantiations of the state of the climate system, which has been perturbed by anthropogenic forcings.

Do I believe that a climate system that hadn’t been perturbed by man-made warming could have generated storm patterns largely equivalent to this year’s? It’s certainly possible, although there’s no record of it happening.

But this is just my attempt to interpret what you mean when you ask whether weather “is the result” of radiative forcing, which doesn’t really make sense.

DEMPSEY: [No response.]

After I wrote about the Inhofe igloo, Dempsey criticized ThinkProgress for not being able to take a joke. On the other hand, it seems he can’t even take a question.

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.”

Today, thousands of youth activists participating in Power Shift ’09 are descending on the U.S. Capitol to demand Congress take action to fight climate change. While students from South Dakota to North Carolina lobby their elected officials, others will be engaging in mass civil disobedience to protest the United States’ continued use of coal.

They will be in the halls of Congress and surrounding the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant despite a wicked snowstorm that is ensnarling the East Coast — or, in many ways, because of it. In a basic sense, what these activists are trying to do is save our weather, growing out of control.

As predicted by models of climate change, the South and West is increasingly gripped by extreme storms and extreme drought: California is in its third consecutive year of drought conditions and now in a state of emergency. Drought conditions in Oklahoma are “terrible.” Despite the triple storms of Dolly, Gustav and Ike in 2008, nearly 97 percent of Texas is in drought — already this year, “about 3,400 wildfires have been reported across the state, scorching nearly 105,000 acres.”

The youth activists are trying to keep it snowing in the Northeast, raining in Texas, cold in the Rockies, and sunny in Florida. They’re trying to prevent California from burning up, Iowa from being flooded out, and Alaska from melting away. They’re trying to get our elected leaders to take action to put an end to the destabilization of our climate. Droughts are increasing. Hurricanes are stronger. Floods and storms are more intense. And it will only get worse.