Happy As Kings:

It's snowing and blowing, therefore the overall increase in global temperatures is a hoax.

Probably not. Climate change, and the overall warming of temperatures around the world, do not mean that winter won't ever be winter in places where winter can be cold and snowy, or where arctic winds can sweep the landscape. Part of the climate change projection is that weather could become increasingly extreme, from a comfort standpoint for the standard Earthling, whether that Earthling has two legs, four legs, no legs, scales, feathers or hair. Extreme goes colder, as well as warmer.

As an explanation for why I credit climate change, I have reasons.

Upon visiting an Austrian glacier along the Hochalpenstrasse about fifteen years after first seeing it in 1977, I was shocked to see how much smaller it was. This was before many of the 'global warming' news reports (and our English-language news in Europe was limited), so I was unprepared to see a smaller glacier. The glacier continues to shrink.
The conclusion, while sitting in traffic and thinking, about the use by people of internal combustion engines fueled by petroleum that has re-released the carbon from an earlier, warmer period in the Earth's history. As I sat in my car, Paleozoic carbon floated free all around me. On the scale that this carbon is freed, it has to have an effect, regardless of who has manipulated what (or not). The human frame of reference does not constitute the known world.

My reasons are miniscule and completely anecdotal, but they were formative for me. I haven't yet found anything to disprove the shrinking of the glacier, or the re-release of carbon into the environment. However, for iron-clad evidence, I have to look elsewhere, which is where part of the trouble begins.

A difficulty in finding specific information, either pro or con in the discussion, is the apparent lack of a central, or centrist, collection of information understandable by the average person (such as myself). Climatologists probably know where to look, but that is not helpful for the everyday citizen who just wants information with as little bias as possible. Searching the Internet reveals too much information that Ms. Everyday cannot assess for accuracy. Good writers can convince us of the ridiculous, and, much more easily, of the debatable. Good performers, even more so. Information, again, is lost in the 'noise.'

Another difficulty is the problem in talking across political outlooks. The source Person A values is scorned by Person B, while Person B's valued sources are dismissed by Person A. How can we have a discussion when the people discussing the subject cannot agree on the basic facts of the discussion? It's almost like American baseball players advising German cookie-bakers about shoeing Spanish horses.

Yet another difficulty in coming to more closely shared views is how do people accept trends that do not fit with their outlooks? During one of the earlier elections in the 2000s I heard or saw a report in which people admitted that candidate A's expressed viewpoints made more sense to them than candidate B's viewpoint, but that the person was going to vote for candidate B anyhow because that B's 'presence'/'aura'/'story' better fit that voter's view of 'how things should be.' The mental model trumped each person's own logic, and the interviewed people admitted it, but clung to their choices.

Then there is our own model of what is 'right.' Today's blizzardy weather around Kansas City reminds me of my childhood winters in South Dakota. To me, and to my New York-born husband, what we're having now is 'normal' and while we need to be sensible about low temperatures and the chill from the wind, the view from the living room window looks like the weather that properly slows molasses in January. I must also wonder about the residence of the writer of the song, "Over the river and through the woods." How many of us would be able to ride to Grandma's in a horse and sleigh through the white and drifted snow in November? Many of the Thanksgiving and Christmas stories from my childhood Childcraft books reflect this cold-enough-to-snow weather. But does that reflect the formative memories of most people today? Perhaps now, a warmer model is 'normal,' and these older stories (if the stories are even in most people's mental library) are catalogued with fairy tales. Earlier times-with-no-computers must equal legendary landscapes. Are scientific data enough to trump a mental model?

Perhaps because of all these variables, each time we have any cooler-to-colder weather, remarks such as "Gee, where's the global warming?" begin to be heard, as if no local weather can be affected by the normal chaos of weather systems. Meanwhile, the global warming is in the oceans where coral reefs are dying, in the deserts where pastuarge for grazing animals is lost, and in the changing habitat of wild animals. While people fiddle around arguing with each other, the planet (in some respects) burns.