East Coast Cooling

The East Coast went through a cold snap over the winter. Overall, I would say that the media is right that this was more newsworthy than the weather in the West, but it's remarkable how oblivious the media has been to our weather.


Here in Washington, we just went through the warmest winter we have ever recorded. We have been talking about drought conditions due to our low snowpacks. While not exactly an urgent news story since the limited snowmelt will hit us in the summer, this is something that should be considered newsworthy.

The extent of the media's bias has created some really odd comments about global warming. The general public seems to be under the impressions that the current (at the time of those comments) weather in the eastern United States establishes the global climate trends.

NASA generates global maps based off of anomalies. Take a look at February, the month of these global warming comments. You can find this map at: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/nmaps.cgi?sat=4&sst=3&type=anoms&mean_gen=02&year1=2015&year2=2015&base1=1951&base2=2014&radius=1200&pol=rob

I should probably point out that I made a slight adjustment to the settings for the map. I don't think it's fair to talk about deviations from average and then halt at 1980 in establishing those averages. Still, February's weather is hardly a compelling argument against global warming.

I know better than to use a one-month snapshot of temperature anomalies to point to long-term climate change. Even so, I still find it remarkable just how few Americans know what's going on even in America thanks to our media's bias.

To make this a little more interesting, my criticism of the media's misrepresentation of reality was followed by a climate summary from NOAA. The meteorological winter (December through February) turned out to be the warmest ever recorded globally. There are still some people who insist that the weather in the east matching what NOAA said the east encountered somehow disproves the NOAA report.

Let me put this another way. I find it to be incredibly odd that a lot of Americans are acting like global warming has conclusively been disproven by this winter's cold weather, especially considering the record warmth. I know that this winter is not enough to prove a trend, but reality certainly does not match the media's portrayal.