The record-breaking snowfall and cold that hit the Northeast in December 2010 forced cancellation of 5,000 airline flights and one NFL football game, prompted six states to declare states of emergency, and left nearly 55 percent of the U.S landmass covered in snow.
This is far from the greatest winter devastation in recent history.
The great blizzard of 1888 piled snow more than 20 feet deep in parts of New York City, forcing some residents to enter and exit their homes from third-story windows.
The year 1816 was called the year without summer because in the Northeast snow remained year-round in the shade of rocks and trees. It was apparently caused by the added chill of high-altitude volcanic ash circling and shading the Earth, happened during what today we call the little ice age that gripped the Northern Hemisphere from around 1400 A.D. until around 1850 A.D.
From America's Revolutionary War we have records of British soldiers dragging heavy cannons across the thick ice from Staten Island to Brooklyn.
During this era the harbors in Boston, New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia repeatedly froze shut in winter. The winter at Valley Forge was far more severe than those today.
We may be sliding back into a little ice age, as I argued long ago in my book "The Cooling." A bit of global warming might supply the atmospheric moisture that could make such a rapid return to Earth's normal colder ice climate happen.
But you would never know this listening to global warming advocates, who in recent days have proclaimed that global warming is the cause of the record-shattering cold and snow in the Northeast, Great Britain, and much of Europe.
A Dec. 22 editorial in Investor's Business Daily (IBD) put its finger precisely on the fallacy in such thinking. As philosopher of science Karl Popper observed, to be valid science a claim must be "falsifiable," testable in a way that can prove it wrong.
But the global warming zealots now claim that any and every extreme of weather — hot or cold, wet or dry, stormy or free from almost all hurricanes — purportedly validates their belief in global warming.
"This isn't science," said IBD, "it's a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed."
For many of these cultists, whom I long ago dubbed climarxists, "their real agenda has nothing to do with climate change at all," opined IBD.
Weeks ago warming scientists, including some caught lying in "climategate," and radical activists convened in Cancun, Mexico, and felt record cold in this tropical resort.
But the failure of their predictions led to no recantation of their dogma. What emerged instead from Cancun was a recommendation that by 2020 the world's rich nations should transfer $100 billion per year to poorer nations to "mitigate" the harm they will suffer from global warming we purportedly have caused.
"This is what global warming is really about," said IBD, "wealth redistribution by people whose beliefs are basically socialist. It has little or nothing to do with climate."
And the largest share of wealth redistribution these climarxists intend via the pretext of global warming will go not from rich to poor, but from the private sector to the public sector, from private property and capitalists to socialists who control government and are eager to grab control over everything.
One such socialist is President Barack Obama, whose Environmental Protection Agency is now defying a vote by the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate that refused to give the EPA unlimited power to regulate so-called greenhouse gases as if they were environmental toxins.
Such power could give the EPA dictatorial power over your body, which with each exhalation emits the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a byproduct of the biological processes that keep you alive.
Such environmental and ideological extremists are unwilling to acknowledge that you are as much a part of "nature" as any other living thing.
They refuse to acknowledge that a human skyscraper or internal combustion engine is therefore just as "natural" as a bird nest or an anthill.
Or that natural climatic change is too vast and complex for today's primitive and politicized science to comprehend.
How much longer will thinking people be fooled by the power-grabbers' global-warming snow job?
Lowell Ponte's new book, co-authored with Craig R. Smith, is "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse," available at crashingthedollar.com
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