Blame warming for the cold? Huh?

Blame the cold weather on global warming? That's the contention of a new meteorological society report as explained in a New York Times opinion piece. If that's not creative science, I don't know what is.

I'm willing to concede that the Earth's climate is changing (and give credit to the scientists who have abandoned the phrase "global warming" for "climate change"), but contending that warming causes cold is more than my liberal-arts mind can grasp. This warming-causes-cold theory seems as shallow as the anti-climate-change crowd's pointing to a one-day low temperature as proof that the Earth isn't warming. There's a difference between weather and climate, the scientists say, and I understand that. A cold snap does not constitute a new ice age, nor does a heat wave (like the ones those same scientists blamed on global warming) constitute proof that Earth is turning into Venus.

Maybe this week's snowstorms and the early snowfalls in several parts of the United States and Europe are nothing more than anomalies. Maybe we'll return to "normal" (whatever that is) next year. For all the publicity their forecasts have received, the climate scientists have not had a particularly good track record in providing "results" of global warming. For the last two years, scientists predicted more and larger hurricanes as a result of global warming, but those forecasts fell flat (thank goodness!). This year, not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States. The predicted rise in sea level has not risen to expectations.

Instead of reading catastrophe into every wrinkle in temperatures or rainfall, we should concentrate on what we all should recognize as true: Industrial development has sharply increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We humans breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. More carbon dioxide in the air is not good for us, so we should do all that we can to limit carbon dioxide emissions. We don't have to prove the verity of global warming or climate change to agree that lowering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good policy.

That's a lot easier to sell than the theory that warming causes cold.