While children in the nation's capital were throwing snowballs outside on another day off from school, Sen. Jim Inhofe was holding a snowball of his own to show the strength of the argument that human activity is not causing global warming.
"In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is," Inhofe asked Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who was presiding over the Senate's debate, as he took a snowball out of a plastic bag.
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"It's a snowball. And it's just from outside here. So it's very, very cold out. Very unseasonable," said the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
He continued with his speech, contending that the "perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record" is a tool the environmentalists use to try "to say that the world's coming to an end and somehow man is important and so powerful that he can change that."
Later in the day, Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse used a prop of his own to counter the Oklahoman's speech.
Using his iPad, Whitehouse referred his colleagues to the website of Earthnow to show how the polar vortex brings the cold air down to the northeastern United States.
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"You can believe NASA and you can believe what their satellites measure on the planet or you can believe the senator with the snowball. The United States Navy takes this very seriously... You can either believe the United States Navy or you can believe the senator with the snowball," said Whitehouse, who also
tweeted his remarks using the hashtag TimeToWakeUp.
The "snowball" speech was not the first time this month that Inhofe, a frequent critic of the Obama administration's environmental policies, has targeted the White House's focus on climate change.
"The President puts an emphasis on climate change as a means to address our national security, which is nothing new and not a strategy," Inhofe said in a statement following the release of the administration's
2015 National Security Strategy.
"It's his same old arguments but in new packaging. He knows that his domestic agenda does nothing to address global temperatures or sea levels while it instead will dramatically affect electricity reliability and affordability for all Americans. The president also knows his international agenda does nothing to address global warming with his less than impressive agreement with China that promises significant action by the United States while China continues to increase its CO2 emissions over the next 15 years," he continued.
While some have argued that variances in cold and hot temperatures can be explained by natural climate cycles, not human activity, others insisted that those variances support claims of global warming alarmists.
"Let's not confuse or interchange climate change with global warming. Global warming – The world is getting warmer. There is more carbon [dioxide] holding in more heat," Bill Nye the Science Guy told MSNBC's Joy Reid earlier in the week.
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"So when the climate changes, some places get colder," he added. "And the thing that's really consistent with climate change models is this variance where it's cold, it's warm, it's cold, it's warm… So what I would hope for, my dream, Joy, is that you all, you and the news business would just say the word climate change."
There is no doubt it is cold, but just how cold depends on which part of the country in which you live and which statistics you employ to measure how "cold" it is, argues meteorologist
David Epstein of Boston.com.
"Even in our daily weather forecasts, the prospect of what if scenarios is too often used to garner a reaction, usually to gain eyeballs or followers. There will be cold and snow this winter and no matter how much or how little there is, spring will arrive sometime in March. Traffic will be impacted, schools closed and too much milk purchased,"
Epstein noted in a recent blog post.