On my way to work Thursday morning, I was greeted with a light dust of snow on my car. That’s Thursday morning like Thursday, October 12. I realize that I live in Minnesota now, but come on.

A few fast-melting flakes in Minneapolis were a little out of place for October, but nothing compared to the record-busting blizzard in Buffalo, NY on Thursday and Friday — over 22 and a half inches. The NYT headline: Snowstorm Blankets Buffalo, Killing at Least 3. Now that’s some serious snow.

Trying to read all about it, my quick google search led me down a dark path of anger and hate: right-wing Web journals and blogs.

The Wide Awakes Web site (tagline: “Your Right Wing Back-Up”) reports:

10.9 inches in Buffalo the next day.

Earliest snowfall in recorded history there.

Depew, NY: 24 inches of snow.

But we’re supposed to spend billions of dollars to “stop” global warming.

And then, over on The Right Angle blog, the Buffalo snowstorm was reported with this grain of salt:

Maybe it’s time for the liberal hysterical media to change their tune again on climate change.

This stuff is strewn about the Web; lots of jokes about Al Gore and a lot of, “Hey, snow in October? Global warming’s a joke!”

Ha ha. As counterintuitive as it might seem, a study from Colgate University in 2003 directly links heavier snowfalls around the Great Lakes (like Buffalo) to global warming:

Records of air temperature, water temperature, and lake ice suggest that the observed lake-effect snow increase during the twentieth century may be the result of warmer Great Lakes surface waters and decreased ice cover, both of which are consistent with the historic upward trend in Northern Hemispheric temperature due to global warming.

Climate and weather patterns are not as simple as the hot and cold faucets on your sink; Buffalo’s blizzard on Friday was caused by “lake-effect” or “lake-enhanced” snow; when cold air passes over warm water, picking up a bunch of moisture and dumping it off-shore. The hotter the lake, the more the snow piles up in your driveway.

The lake wasn’t particularly warm or anything, was it? From weather.com:

THE INSTABILITY PARAMETERS ARE ALMOST HISTORIC WITH SUCH A SITUATION WITH A 62 DEGREE LAKE INVOLVED MAKE THIS ALMOST UNPRECEDENTED.

Oh, right. But where did all the cold air come from this early in Autumn? Apparently, global warming fueled disasterous weather in Alsaka last week pushed it down through Canada. From Sto Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel:

I have written on the impacts of climate change upon day-to-day weather patterns in these pages during the past year . . . For now, suffice it to say that I think the occurrence of this event in Alaska was not an “accident.” . . . By the way, there’s a connection betwen that system and the chilly blast about to enter the lower 48 from Canada.

When you get over 20 inches of snow in mid-October — thundersnow, with frequent lightning — don’t be so quick to discount patterns of global, catastrophic climate change when they rear their ugly heads, just because they didn’t manifest in a heat wave like you thought they might.

A couple of weeks ago I saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s global warming movie. A friend of mine passed on seeing it, saying “It’s not going to tell me anything I don’t know.”

I sort of felt the same way. Yes, yes, I thought, global warming is bad and we’re all going to die. But the thing is, after seeing it, I’ve realized that global warming IS bad. And we’re all. Going. To die.

The film is mainly Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation, which doesn’t sound thrilling, but the numbers and data he presents are staggering (absent from the presentation is the caution of the 2000 campaign speeches, replaced with a speaking presence and confidence noted by reviewers that makes me think of a viable comeback Gore ticket in 2008).

Drilling into arctic ice has allowed scientists to chart global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations back for 400,000+ years. First off, as CO2 levels rise, so does the average global temperature. Second, over thousands of years, there is a cyclical rise and fall of temperature, as the conservative global warming nay-sayers claim: but the current numbers are way beyond all that. Obviously, visibly off the charts.

If trends aren’t reversed, the difference between how hot it is outside now and average global temps in 100 years will be the difference between today and the last ice age.

So what? So it’s hotter . . . I live in Minneapolis, anyway.

Well, in the last 30 years the fourth-largest body of water in Africa, Lake Chad, has almost completely dried up — due to overtapping for human use and, you guessed it, climate change.

Warmer ocean temperatures fuel stronger tropical storms: the leap to link last year’s record-breaking hurricane season, including the overpowering disaster of Katrina, to global warming is a small one, made by many, including TIME magazine.

But maybe the scariest is the possibility of a sudden, dramatic climate change, a la The Day After Tomorrow. No, not in a day. But in as little as 5 – 10 years, Europe could be plunged into an new ice age: due to the influx of cold fresh water from melting ice in greenland pouring into the north atlantic, disrupting the gulf stream and global ocean heat transferring currents.

The complex, multitude of variables that affect global climate change are not fully understood, but it doesn’t take a climatologist to interpret three recent New York Times’ headlines:

Hundreds Evacuated in Chicago as Heat Wave Persists

NYC Officials Up Heat Death Toll to 20

In California, Heat Is Blamed for 100 Deaths