It's Snowing in the Summer in Australia -- A Sign of Global Climate Change

Climate change deniers love putting scare quotes around the term global warming, pointing to situations when the weather is much colder than usual as evidence that the phenomenon doesn't exist. That's exactly what's happened in Australia recently, as the country has seen record snowfalls -- in the middle of summer.

George Munbiot at the Guardian schools us on why climate change deniers have it all wrong in their simplistic view of "global warming":

There is now strong evidence to suggest that the unusually cold winters of the last two years in the UK are the result of heating elsewhere....The global temperature maps published by Nasa present a striking picture. Last month's shows a deep blue splodge over Iceland, Spitsbergen, Scandanavia and the UK, and another over the western US and eastern Pacific. Temperatures in these regions were between 0.5C and 4C colder than the November average from 1951 and 1980. But on either side of these cool blue pools are raging fires of orange, red and maroon: the temperatures in western Greenland, northern Canada and Siberia were between 2C and 10C higher than usual. Nasa's Arctic oscillations map for 3-10 December shows that parts of Baffin Island and central Greenland were 15C warmer than the average for 2002-9. There was a similar pattern last winter. These anomalies appear to be connected....

So why wasn't this predicted by climate scientists? Actually it was, and we missed it. Obsessed by possible changes to ocean circulation (the Gulf Stream grinding to a halt), we overlooked the effects on atmospheric circulation.

Read more about the science behind these global changes in the Guardian.