As winter descends, Fox is keeping with its annualtradition of using snowstorms and cold temperatures to mock global warming.
The suggestion that local winter weather somehow disproves global, long-term warmingtrends is a recurring theme at Fox, despite its faulty logic. During the hot summer months, Fox News' silence on global warming is deafening. But like clockwork, when the snow starts to accumulate so does Fox's climate coverage.
Here are some of the highlights from recent years:
But as meteorologist Jeff Masters explained, “heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet. In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favor of more extreme storms in all seasons.”
A 2009 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program stated that “strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent” in the Northeast and upper Midwest as a result of climate change.
So for all of Fox's misguided sarcasm, it's likely that some big snowstorms in the U.S. are, in part, a symptom of a changing climate.