Weather 101 - the Al Gore Effect

The answer is: When they come to town, it's probably best to leave. Jessica's arrival can be deadly; Cantore's always involves a bad storm; and Gore's almost always means an end to local or regional "global warming."

Yes, Al Gore has a history of showing up to speak or being involved in a major climate change event and the weather just doesn't cooperate. Instead of excessive warmth, really cold weather and/or a snowstorm occurs. This is affectionately known as the "Gore Effect."
And, the inconvenient truth (pun intended) is that it seems to happen summer or winter.

Let's consider a few cases that make the point...

In Australia, in November 2006, Al Gore visited two weeks before Southern Hemisphere summer began and the Gore Effect struck. According to online reports attributed to The Age (http;//www.theage.com.au), "Ski resort operators gazed at the snow in amazement. Parents took children out of school and headed for the mountains. Cricketers scurried amid bullets of hail as Melburnians traded lunchtime tales of the incredible cold."

Gore spoke in New Zealand prior to going to Australia. Yes, it snowed there, as well.

On another speaking tour, according to the New York Environment News, Gore chose January 15, 2004, one of the coldest days in New York City's history, to rail against the Bush administration and global warming skeptics. Gore told a startled audience, that global warming was causing record cold temperatures.

In March 2007, a snowstorm led to the cancellation of a Capitol Hill media briefing on a Senate climate bill.

And on October 22, 2007 Gore's global warming speech at Harvard University coincided with near 125-year record-breaking low temperatures. Less than a week later, on October 28, the British House of Commons held a marathon debate on global warming during London's first October snowfall since 1922.

Sometimes the Gore Effect isn't instantaneous, but takes place over time as described here. Toronto's snow drought in 2006 was transformed into the snowiest winter in 125 years during 2008.

In late January 2009, Gore was slated to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Washington, DC) on the "urgent need" to combat global warming. The hearing was almost postponed due to a snowstorm.

About 5 weeks later (March 2, 2009), the Capitol Climate Action (CCA) Protest made a comparable bad choice concerning the date of its planned protest march. The protest, slated to be the largest mass civil disobedience event in support of controlling climate was upstaged by a daylong heavy snow event. Five inches of snow fell in Washington, DC, while winds gusting to about 35 mph made the 20-degree temperatures feel quite a bit colder. The CCA had to choose between following through on the protest (which it did) or to cancel it because of the snowstorm. The humor was not lost on the media. FoxNews.com noted that it was "snowing irony in Washington."

Well, it's now time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference that began in Copenhagen, Denmark on December 7, 2009 (which I have declared as a Day of Environmental Infamy). And the Gore Effect strikes yet again.

Since December 6th, temperatures across the United States have plummeted well into the deep freeze and snow already covers more than 50% of the Nation. In fact, almost the entire U.S. was below to far below average in both the maximum and minimum temperature departments. In some places, the departure was as much as 15 to 20 degrees below average. While there were a few areas on a few days with above average readings, these literally evaporated by December 10.

So, let's first look briefly at the temperature departures across the U.S. for the first half of the Copenhagen Conference (courtesy of NOAA's Climate Prediction Center).

With the exception of a brief one day on December 9, 2009 (reds and tans), the chill (blues) dominates almost the entire country for almost the entire period.

And another arctic outbreak is enroute as next week unfolds.

The Gore Effect is really pretty dramatic and pretty ironic when you think about it. And to think, we used to think that global warming was caused by all that hot air originating in Washington, DC.