Hope and Fail

President: Lack of Olympic snow proof of global warming. Except …

During a town hall in Henderson, Nev., an audience member from France asked President Obama about government regulation of carbon. Obama responded by debunking the claims of global warming skeptics that the recent massive snow storms on the East Coast are proof global warming isn’t true.

The president was right that a single weather event isn’t a true measure of global temperature trends, but he ruined his point by adding a specious anecdote of his own:

First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody is like — a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, see, look at that, there’s all this snow on the ground, this doesn’t mean anything. I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean that every place is getting warmer; it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees, and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow.

Not only is the president doing exactly what he criticizes global warming skeptics of doing, he’s completely wrong.

The lack of snow in Vancouver this time of year is perfectly normal, as noted by Canadian Donna Laframboise:

Excuse me, but I happen to not only live here in Canada, but to have had family and friends who resided for years in or near the breathtakingly gorgeous (not to mention murderously expensive) city of Vancouver.

I know, therefore, that they don’t own many winter coats in that part of our vast country – and that mowing their lawns is a perfectly ordinary February activity. Vancouver’s weather is much like Seattle’s and, as a friend of mine who lives in the American city mentioned this week, her daffodils have begun to bloom.

She points to a Vancouver Sun article about the Olympic Committee’s knowledge of Vancouver’s moderate temperatures before choosing the city to hose the event:

Statistics compiled by The Vancouver Sun indicate that no city with a climate as mild as Vancouver’s has ever hosted the Winter Games.

Past Olympics have been held in picturesque, snowy towns full of residents bundled up in ski gear.

But world sports fans who turn on their TVs in 2010 will probably see the kind of winter Vancouverites know all too well: a cloudy, rainy city full of people carrying umbrellas.

In the month of February, when the Games will be held, Vancouver has an average temperature of 4.8 degrees Celsius.

Ed Morrisey also points out that the average Vancouver temperature in late February is 48 degrees — well above freezing and near the “55 degrees” Obama cited during his town hall.