Short term: aberrant, violent weather. Long term: climate change. Problem: man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds. Guilty: Capitalists -- Chinese and Americans -- who resist regulation in order to maintain quarterly profit statements. Victims: 1.2 billion Chinese, then Americans, then the planet, which will be as hospitable to human life as Venus.

Better go scrape some more Global Warming... er, "Climate Change"... er, Settled SCIENCE off your driveway before we all freeze to death!

So happy that I'm not in Ohio right now. It's nice and toasty here in Florida. I feel sorry for you guys who have to deal with that snow up there.

After reading the comment from Freedom Fighter, nobody can ever convince me that there's no such thing as a Right Wing Lunatic Fringe.

After reading the comment from Reality Dweller, nobody can convince me that there are no Americans who don't understand, and therefore fanatically oppose, science and its methods.

They have relinquished the act of thinking more than any brainwashed North Korean.

I don't oppose all scientific method, UW, but I am a little skeptical of the scientific "method" of changing the name of one's theory from "Anthropogenic Global Warming" to "Climate Change" the moment the overwhelming body of evidence begins to contradict the very things your AGW "theory" predicted ....... Seems to me your only scientific "method" is to insult anyone who questions AGW .... oh, whoops, "Climate Change"

First science tells us that for millenia the earth has undergone dramatic climate changes of hot and cold, long before man-made industry appeared. And then that same science is now used to teach Global Warming? So what has changed? Nothing. The MYTH of "Global Warming" by the left-wing greenie lunatic fringe led by Al Gore and The Left is just another way to tax industrial giants and force electric cars on the population. There is no proof whatsoever that man-made emissions are the cause of dramatic shifts in climate over tha last two centuries. The earth continues in cycles of climate change by itself. The leftard Dimowits are sold on green conspiracies anyway and want to sell them as scientific facts. But they are just myths perpetuated by the birther Neo-hippy crowd that collects generations of SSI and smokes pot all day as well as gullible left-leaning college students that collect government grants and owe student loans who think driving a Prius is admirable. In this day and age people will believe in anything simply because they looked it up on Google or some leftard politician tweeted about it.

Gotta love how people bring politics into this.

Seems to me, the only victims of "Global Warming" so far have been its believers, such as those morons down in Antarctica whose ship got stuck in the ice... in Summer, no less. They had to be rescued by--get this--a Chinese ice cutter whose people Weathbee assures us are all going to roast to death somehow. Nobody has ever yet died of Global Warming. Many have died from too much government.

In the old days such weather reporting would have claimed a severe cold front with abnormal snowfall. But today meteorologists and the news outlets just make up names. Right now according to the news, we are facing a "Polar Vortex" which sounds like a title of a cheap science fiction movie on SyFy! To me, this is nothing new having experienced strange weather over many decades in five states from coast-to-coast. Btw, I don't trust science anymore as it can be manipulated far too easily and by many ideological fanatics. When I heard that the cutting down of trees in the Amazon, supposedly the lungs of the planet, was gonna kill the planet, I just gave up on taking nature and weather shows seriously. Apocalypse fanatics are using everything these days! Call me Grandpa Doubtful.

You North Americans are parochial creatures. The highest temperature recorded here so far this year has been 125 degrees Fahrenheit in Moomba, South Australia, on Jan. 2, while in Sydney on Monday temperatures were a sweltering 96 degrees.
While less extensive and prolonged than the record breaking hot spell that opened 2013, the country’s Bureau of Meteorology called the latest heat wave a “remarkable event” in a statement Monday. The bureau confirmed that last year was Australia’s hottest in more than a century of records, easily breaking the previous record set in 2005 by 32.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
For many years, in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence, the American Tobacco Institute denied that smoking caused cancer and emphysema because scientists could not isolate the carcinogen. At some point, statistical correlation and common sense kicked in.

Nobody cares about the temperature in Oz nor the 'Sky is falling' doomsday reports that Antartic ice is melting at a record rate and will flood the earth! Oz is no place special- try the heat waves in California, Southwest, Deep South, and on over to Florida. If Australia was incinerated by heat, no one would miss you people nor your Foster's beer, Kylie music, and Aussie shampoo!!! N America has its own wool too and doesn't care about marsupials. So, you had a hot year and this year might be hotter. How does that prove global warming? You are on average less hot than Africa on any given day. And your cigarette analogy fails too as smoking is bad for everyone and yet there are devoted smokers that live well past their mid-70s into their 80s, 90s, even the 100 mark! Nobody knows why or how. Btw, where was your Bureau of Meterology over the last few millenniums of climate change just as harsh ;-)

@Oz h8tr: I'll pick up on just one of your bigoted and illogical statements, mate. So somebody smokes 5 packs a day and lives to be 100. So what? We're talking about the statistics of risk. A Canadian study quoted the lifetime risk for lung cancer in male smokers at 17.2% (11.6% in women) versus only 1.3% in male non-smokers (1.4% in female non-smokers).
The Australian summer heat wave by itself proves as little about global warming as does a North American winter cold snap rebut the reams of Earth photos from NASA, sea-level measurements, and an all-time high of atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by industrial emissions.
Stop acting as the troll you condemn, using various names. We know who you are.

Life is full of risks and liquor kills more than all the others combined. Same variables though. One person has one too many and dies while another drinks gallons and lives to a ripe old age. Global Warming is a Democrat and Greenie myth that has no real scientific backing, just wild theories of dramatic climate change which the Republicans have torn apart using the same science and chronological weather patterns of this earth for millennia. Today it's a heat wave caused by speculative emissions and greehouse effect, tomorrow could be the beginning of a new natural ice age! Nothing is new under the sun as these cycles have been going on long before industrialization and internal combustion engines started belching pollution. Btw, who are WE? Is this Meriadoc and company? And who cares about former British criminal dumping ground Oz? What has Oz contributed to the world of any significance that changed history forever? Murdering Abos and redistributing their children doesn't count... except down under!!! You are the people that hate Asians too, hence the saying in Oz of "Two Wongs don't make a White!" WHY would anyone listen to anything you have to say, you drongo??? Planet on the barby? Sorry mate, you're a nit.

Let's start with a partial list of Australian Nobel Laureates: Pharmacologist and pathologist Howard Florey shared a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his work extracting penicillin. Other Australian scientists who are Nobel Laureates include William Bragg, John Warcup Cornforth, John Eccles, Bernard Katz, Peter Doherty and Elizabeth Blackburn.
You want athletes, opera singers, inventors? Look them up yourself. They're every bit as good as, say, Germans. Just not as accomplished in mass murder.

I'm from the penal colony, too, and I prefer Waltzing Matilda over Deutchland Uber Alles any day, you warped, demented, hating, hypocritical, fascist, reclusive, cheating, mentally deformed, sub-human midget. Get the hell out of here, you S.O.B. Drongo? I don't report. I bite.

Actually, Ozh8tr, I WOULD care if the Antarctic ice pack was melting at a record rate, because that would be a world changing event. The fact is that it is expanding and now has reached record size, as a group of climate adventurers on the Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy have just discovered to their dismay. In fact, the Antarctic ice pack has been expanding for at least the last thirty years ....... Moreover, this recent Shokalskiy expedition, which was retracing the route of Australian explorer Douglas Mawson to Commonwealth Bay, highlighted the fact, for those who have any sort of open mind at all, that the very seas that trapped this ship were FREE OF ICE one hundred years ago, as demonstrated by a picture of an ice-free Commonwealth Bay taken by the Mawson party

Seems like the players here on this thread have lost their marbles over a parody concerning snow! Stop shoveling sh*t here and come help us shovel snow back east!!! I understand the political swipes but what has Australia and Nazi Germany have to do with climate??? Perplexed. Callmelennie has an excellent point about Antarctic ice melting which also affects marine and mammal life in the area. I don't think that the world will become flooded again, but this freeze is truly chilling (no pun intended)! And at least "instant frostbite" is being proven :)