On the night of November 30/December 1, 2006, my husband and I lay in bed listening to ice crash from the roofs of the nearby houses. It had simply gotten too thick and heavy to resist gravity. Since the power lines in our neighborhood run through the woods behind our houses, we lost power of course. For a week. That’s not like losing it in the summer–which we had done the previous July for nine days. At least in the summer, it stays light later. It was so depressing in the evenings.

So I dreaded–assumed we were in for–another miserable week or more with this last storm. Didn’t happen. The den is warm, the lights are bright, and I just cooked dinner on our electric stove. Owing to the vagaries of winter storms coming from the South, the forecast was wrong. Mercifully. We got more sleet than freezing rain, so there were few power outages. We will have to take steps, though, because winter storms like this week’s are going to be more common.

Bill O’Reilly didn’t understand why climate change would mean more snow and ice storms, but Al Gore explained it to him.

Last week on his show Bill O’Reilly asked, “Why has southern New York turned into the tundra?” and then said he had a call in to me. I appreciate the question.

As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming:

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”

Whether O’Reilly gets it now, I couldn’t say. But I plan to look into a gas insert for our fireplace.