Snowpocalypse Now!

If you live on the East Coast, I hope you're preparing to hunker down this weekend: Two-plus feet of snow are predicted in Washington, D.C., perhaps enough to break the record. New York is also expecting more snow.

So perhaps it's time to revisit climate science, again. Does this winter's flurry of harsh weather mean that we can breathe easier about the climate?

Sadly, no. In fact, quite the reverse, according to a recent report from the National Wildlife Federation.

The report documents that winters are, on average, shorter and milder than they used to be. But "[e]ven as global warming is slowly changing the character of winter," it says, "we will still experience familiar year-to-year variability. Because many different variables affect winter conditions—including temperature, moisture availability, storm tracks, and natural climate oscillations—and because global warming affects these variables in different ways, scientists do not expect a steady progression to less wintery conditions."

NWF climate scientist Dr. Amanda Staudt put it perhaps even more bleakly in a statement about the report: "Oddball winter weather is yet another sign of how uncontrolled carbon pollution amounts to an unchecked experiment on people and nature."

In other words, there's still a lot we don't know, and for this particular experiment we are our own guinea pigs.

Photo credit: antisocialtory