Mister Hundred and One…

I heard a phrase over the Christmas holiday that really irked me.
In fact, here’s the story from the New York Times website (subscription required). The suspect paragraph appears below:

What seemed like a meteorological aberration — the coatless, hatless, gloveless morning commute in Washington, New York and Boston — is starting to feel like the new normal, encouraging consumers to splurge on a flat-screen television instead of a peacoat.

The glut of winter wear has sent a chill through the executive suites of major retailers, who count on big profits from coats in the crucial holiday shopping season. They are even starting to grumble about the first “global warming Christmas.”

So like farmers praying for rain, merchants have begun scanning weather forecasts, hoping for a sudden drop in temperature to lift their sales.

The first global warming Christmas.
That makes me want to puke.
Right. It’s got to be global warming. I mean what other explanation could there be? (Other than the reference to Heat Miser in “The Year Without a Santa Claus” that I used in the title for this posting.) Human beings (read: the Bush Administration) must be responsible for the warmer-than-average winter that we’re having this year. Hell, on Christmas Day here in my native New Hampshire, it was a whole FIFTY-FIVE degrees! We had our first snow of the season on December 30th—and we only got ONE INCH! Rain washed it away the next day!
Yep…got to be global warming.
Or, is it? How quickly people forget about…
El Niño.
That’s right. El Niño. A naturally occurring oceanic-atmospheric climate fluctuation that occurs as the result of normal circulating weather patterns. I’m no meterologist, but I’m thinking that’s going to make things warmer. In fact, here’s the forecast from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

Yep, that sure is going to make it warmer, isn’t it?
Folks, this isn’t global warming in action. It’s Mother Nature. It’s the Earth working as it should and doing something that’s perfectly normal. But, hey…it was printed in the New York Times, so it has to be true, right?
The next time some liberal tree hugger or envirofreak starts blaming global warming for the temperatures this winter, please…drop some actual science on them.
William Smith
ConservativeBlogger.com