From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Let It Snow
Global-warming hysteria flies south for the winter.

Friday, December 6, 2002 12:01 A.M. EST

Is there anything more oppressive than the global-warming debate? Well, there is campaign-finance reform. But for the layman, who must contend with wind and rain--and, this week, snow--more than with the Federal Election Commission, the warming debate is the more painful one. It has the effect, in a world already overburdened with politics, of politicizing even the weather.

The presumption of global warming hangs heavy over daily life. A heat wave in the summer isn't just hot--it is evidence of a major shift in atmospheric dynamics requiring the intervention of the federal government. A merely chilly winter, instead of a cold one, requires a rethinking of carbon-dioxide emissions, fossil fuels and that Kyoto treaty the U.S. wisely walked away from.

Social relations suffer under the pressure of such weatherly partisanship. Relatives stop speaking to each other; thermostats take on a symbolic meaning. In many quarters, to resist the warming logic is to be considered neanderthal, philistine, right-wing, even unkind to animals. Civilization threatens to break under the strain.

Thus it was with some pleasure that we read this week, in the Aftenposten of Oslo, that Norwegians are shivering through their coldest winter since 1980. Meanwhile, a bitter cold spell has hit Moscow. By mid-week it had sent 157 to the hospital for hypothermia, often (the Sydney Herald reports) people who had been drinking too much and had neglected to find shelter. That is not good news, of course, but we have to admire the climatic spiritedness that could bring such dramatic consequences to bouts of normal Russian excess.

But the biggest news of all has been the winter storm that gathered force in the American Midwest earlier this week, unloosing snow and freezing rain on Oklahoma, Texas and Missouri before heading east. The storm brought down power lines and closed schools and roads. In short, it made life miserable for citizens lulled into complacency by the global warmists. The eastern seaboard got its snowy lesson yesterday; the nation's capital may have had more snow in the past 24 hours than in all of last winter.

Alas, there are those who will see in traditional winter weather more signs of global warming. This is known as eating your cake and having it too, or verifying a theory with opposing evidence. We cannot help remembering a January 1996 Newsweek cover story, "The Hot Zone," in which global warming was blamed for winter's blizzards, among other things.

But why believe Newsweek? Two decades before, in April 1975, it had noted "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically"--toward global cooling. The magazine predicted "a new ice age."

Maybe one effect of winter 2002 will be finally to prove Newsweek right. At the very least a thick blanket of whiteness could muffle the weather-inspired rancor we've all been enduring of late. May we shiver together in peace.

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