Global warming may be the last thing on the minds of Delawareans still recovering from the second major snowstorm in a month, with a third in the offing.

http://www.delawareonline.com/articl...0333/1006/NEWS
By JEFF MONTGOMERY • The News Journal • February 9, 2010

But recent record snowfall doesn't clash with the larger trend of the Earth getting warmer, climate scientists said Monday.
"It's very easy for us to look out a window and say global warming is not happening," said Cornell University weather scientist Stephen J. Colluci. "Tell that to people who are living in areas where sea level rise will make them homeless."
Colluci said climate-change skeptics were likely to seize on snow in the East as proof of their skeptical stand.
Atmospheric scientist Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville is among those who doubt a long-term warming trend is occurring. The weather -- including the 2 inches of snow that fell recently on the southern campus -- is simply hard to predict lately, he said.
"There's chaotic variation in the climate system that will make one winter different from the next," Spencer said. "My opinion is that most variability in weather, no matter where it is on earth, is natural and not related to any kind of long-term climate change due to mankind."
At Mary's Place in Wilmington, restaurant-owner Mary Austin said little attention was being paid to the experts. She and many of her customers decided long before December's big snow that the weather has been changing.
The breakfast-lunch business along North Lincoln Street near Shallcross Avenue was closed by snow Saturday and reopened Monday only with snow-shoveling help from neighbors.
"I don't think the science behind it is relevant to a lot of people here. The general consensus is that climate change is happening: You don't have to convince them," Austin said. "It's just the drasticness -- the extreme heat in the summer or the snow. The weather here has changed."
Both sides in the science debate attribute the recent storms to unusually warm Pacific sea surface temperatures -- a phenomenon called El Niño. The warm water affected the atmosphere, setting up storms in the eastern United States that have repeatedly collided with unusual air currents draining cold air south from the Arctic.