That cold snap was global warming in action

Last week was cold. Real cold. Mitten cold.

Not just here. England was so cold a picture of it from a NASA satellite became instantly famous (right).

So that means global warming is a crock, no? The Daily Mail says so. Fox and Friends are repeating it. No more problem, right?

Wrong. Just the opposite.

Some of the evidence can be seen on Fox's own story, comparing temperatures to normal across the northern hemisphere.

Sure, it was colder than normal in the temperate zone, but look at the pole. It was much warmer than normal in Greenland, in eastern Siberia, at Sarah Palin's house.

What is at work is the arctic oscillation, which has become extremely negative over the last month. It's practically off the chart, writes The New York Times.

China is blaming global warming for the cold, and there may be something to that. Instability is increasing in global weather patterns as average temperatures warm.

In the Arctic, warmer weather means less ice is being produced, meaning there is less ice to melt this summer.

Glaciers and ice caps are natural temperature regulators. They act the way fat acts on your body. When there is nothing to eat, you essentially eat your own fat. This is what got your ancestors through famines. It may be why you have such high cholesterol now.

Ice takes a lot of heat to warm even one degree, just as fat is harder to metabolize than other forms of energy your body stores. Once it's gone, however, temperatures can rise very, very fast. Thin people who don't metabolize food efficiently die fast in famines.

We know what happens when glaciers disappear from mountains, as is now happening on Kilimanjaro. No water flows for the long, hot summer. The land around a de-glaciated mountain becomes desert.

The same thing is happening right now, in the Arctic, to the whole world. While you're shivering, we're losing our global temperature regulator, the globe's fat.

Once that's gone global warming can take off like a rocket.

Cold enough for you? It's your final warning.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com