The Union of Concerned Scientists recently reported that Exxon contributed some 16 million dollars over a period of several years to a number of what we may call "front groups" over on the ideological right whose main goal was not to disprove global warming and human influence on it — that would have been impossible! — but simply to cast enough doubt on the question of scientific proof of global warming in the public mind to delay any effective action (of the sort that would hurt the oil companies' bottom line) to slow down the rate of global warming. Given the Bush administration's attitude toward the question over the past six years, the money seems to have been well spent.
Meanwhile, what seems to be the same group of people are quoting the occurrence of two anomalous snowstorms in Colorado as "proof" that there really is no such thing as global warming. (We may, of course, ignore anomalous phenomena to the contrary, such as the massive heatwave a couple of years ago that killed several tens of thousands of people in Europe, or the one that swept over much of the United States last July.)
Meanwhile, again, I gather from the news that over on the East Coast people are scratching their heads and wondering whatever happened to winter. Temperatures seem to be running on the order of 15 degrees (Fahrenheit) above normal for this time of year. Global warming, anyone?
I would suggest that those people may simply be patient for a few years. Many of them are familiar with a phenomenon known as the "lake effect": when a mass of cold, dry air swoops down from Canada over the Great Lakes, it picks up lots and lots of moisture from the lakes and dumps it out as snow over upper New York State. One may wonder whether there will be a similar effect, on a continental scale, when cold air masses forming over the Arctic Ocean are no longer barred from the ocean's moisture by the layer of ice (now melting very, very quickly) covering that vast layer of water, and plunge southward as cold wet air masses rather than cold dry air masses.