Snowy South means no Global Warming? Sorry - wrong answer...

So, I have been listening to so many people talking about that the insane snows we have been seeing this year are evidence that global warming is not truly happening. You can read blogs and articles on these suppositions all over:

• Is global warming real? Do snowstorms offer eco-lessons? at USA Today
• Snowstorms in China… what about global warming?
• Freak Winter Weather: Fluke or Fuel in Warming Debate? at NatGeo

But there are two basic principles that should really define the debate: snow happens when there is moisture in the air (high humidity) and the ambient temperature is below freezing. Since the Northern Hemisphere is in the winter zone (furthest away from the sun), there will be plenty of days where there are freezing temperatures (even in Florida and other southern states).

The difference is the amount of humidity that is in the air and how long it is staying in the air. With El Nino spinning off warm humid air, and the increasingly warm temperatures in the atmosphere due to the changing global climate, is there any surprise that there are big snowstorms?

And, to put a finer point on it - listen to the Washington Post:

In most places, winter is clearly growing shorter and less intense. We can tell, because Arctic sea ice is melting, because the glaciers on Greenland are shrinking and because a thousand other signals send the same message. Here in the mountains of the Northeast, for instance, lakes freeze later than they used to, and sometimes not at all: Lake Champlain remained open in winter only three times during the 19th century, but it did so 18 times between 1970 and 2007.

But rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren't trivial -- global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970. That means that the number of "extreme events" such as downpours and floods has grown steadily; the most intense storms have increased by 20 percent across the United States in the past century.

Get off your a**es, Members of Congress, and solve this problem instead of letting our Repugs blow more hot air into the problem.

Additional source: Snowstorms Bring up New Global Warming Debate from Hollywood Today