When I was a newspaper reporter — back in the last ice age, har har har — I was assigned to cover a press conference staged by an agency of the New Jersey state government.  The state was suffering from a severe drought, and the agency (the Department of Environmental Protection, I think, but don’t hold me to that) wanted to underscore the importance of the temporary water-use restrictions it had imposed.

So what happened on the morning of the press conference?  You guessed it… the skies opened.  There was localized flooding. The DEP spokesman scrambled to explain how one big rainstorm wasn’t nearly enough to solve the state’s water woes, but he ruefully admitted, “it’s hard to sell a drought in a rainstorm.”

Yes, yes, climate is not the same as weather, ocean temperatures are a serious concern, blah blah blah.  But as I nursemaid finicky furnaces in my home and church, I can’t help thinking — where’s global warming when you really need it?

Via Gay Patriot, here are some of the latest anthropogenic dispatches from the frigid front lines:

– US in Grips of Long-Lasting Cold Spell
– Temps Plunge to Record as Cold Snap Freezes North, East States…
– CHILL MAP…
– Vermont sets ‘all-time record for one snowstorm’…
– Iowa temps ‘a solid 30 degrees below normal’…
– Peru’s mountain people ‘face extinction because of cold conditions’…
– Beijing — coldest in 40 years…
– World copes with Arctic weather…

I’m all in favor of finding ways to reduce our dependence on the carbon-based fuels that create greenhouse gases.  But it’s hard to believe we need to cripple the global economy for the sake of the planet.

Also via GayPatriot, this assessment from a meteorologist who formerly headed the National Hurricane Center:

The revelation of Climate-gate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth’s temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?