In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Barack Obama warned, “[W]e have to act with more urgency – because a changing climate is already harming Western communities struggling with drought, and coastal cities dealing with floods. That’s why I directed my administration to work with states, utilities and others to set new standards on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants are allowed to dump into the air.” Those regulations are greatly harming the coal industry and are thus reflected on your monthly power bill.

Obama then declared, “[T]he debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”

Indeed, much of the nation saw several inches of “climate change” Tuesday, as snow and ice covered several states as far south as the Gulf Coast. In the South, thousands of people were stuck for hours – often overnight – in traffic or wherever they could find shelter, kids were stranded at school, and a region unaccustomed to dealing with such weather was crippled.

One of the main problems in the South was inaccurate forecasting. Chattanooga meteorologist Paul Barys admitted, “This was just not what we were seeing in the forecast models.” Therefore, road crews made almost no preparation until the snow actually began to fall, and schools waited until then to send kids home, compounding a bad situation. The South isn’t exactly known for its snowplows anyway.

It’s important to note that weather is not the same thing as climate, but we’ll make some observations. First, climatologists also use computer forecast models to show that the climate is changing. Computer models can be wrong, especially if the data entered is faulty, and that’s true if the prediction is tomorrow’s weather or the next century’s climate. Indeed, as we noted above, there hasn’t been any global warming in 17 years – hence the change in terminology to “climate change.” Second, alarmists like Barack Obama constantly point to weather patterns – drought and floods, for example – as definitive proof that, in order to prevent climate change, we need draconian government regulations and taxes that will hit the economy like, well, a snow storm in Atlanta. And no matter the weather, these alarmists blame climate change. Truth is the only thing getting plowed.