Whiplash: Cold Snap Caps Warmest Decade on Record

It's been raining for weeks in California — like it's supposed to in the winter, a small fact which many locals have forgotten in the last several years of drought.

It's been snowing on the East Coast — like it's supposed to in the winter, an inconvenient truth that many have allowed to slip from their minds after a decade of warmer weather.

Climate change seems to be taking a breather, which is good news for skeptics who are bouncing these cold weather stories around the internet like desperate housewives with a bit of gossip.

But what does the cold snap really show? Apparently not much. Not only were the Naughts the warmest decade on record according to NASA, but 2009 was the second-warmest year on record. The warmest was 2005, and all the other list-toppers have occurred since 1998.

"When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability," said NASA's James Hansen, "we find global warming is continuing unabated."

Okay, but do we have to choose between absolute panic and willful myopia?

L.A. Times columnist Meghan Daum takes the middle road:

"This year's weather may be less convenient for the global warming cause, but it doesn't change the facts — the climate is changing. Here's the rub, though: In order for a cause to resonate, people need simple, clear evidence. They need tangibles. And what could be more tangible than opening your door and being hit by a blast of fiery air?"

We're human, after all, and we can only be focused about so many things at once. Even so, Daum concludes, "If we're really interested in the truth -- about global warming or anything else — it helps to get beyond what's outside our own doors and windows."

Which is, I think, precisely the point.

The standoff over climate change isn't about the egotism of being right. It's about the things outside our windows — the living things, the slope of land we find so lovely, and further than that, the people in countries we may or may not have visited and the wildly beautiful landscapes it takes work to see, to which strange plants and animals have — over time frames beyond our capacity to imagine — adapted themselves so exquisitely.

It's about the possibility of seeing beyond ourselves. That's what I'm fighting for. I just hope time doesn't run out before the curmudgeons catch up and start looking out their windows, too.

Photo credit: gjeewaytee