You stare confirmation in the face with the simple statement..."in my 50 years of living here, I have never seen that much snow" and yet you misinterpret that to mean climate change is FALSE. Would you like to take a minute and think of what you just said? In actuality, more snow is directly associated with a warmer planet, due to the fact that there is more water in the atmosphere to work with, due to higher levels of evaporation. Local temperature dictates how that precipitation will fall...in your case it fell as snow. If the globe was cooling, snowfall and all precipitation in general would decrease overall, where in actuality, overall precip levels have increased steadily. The things that have changed are the ways that precipitation gets distributed, which is why the southeast is in such a bad drought for 15 years.
Making an assertion that global warming is false because it's cold in winter in your backyard is about as idiotic as saying it's true because it's hot during the summer.
When continental drift creates mountains, or when a continent drifts over a pole, then snow starts to fall. Snow reflects the Sun's heat back into space, so cooling the Earth. Overabundance of snow eventually cools the atmosphere. This is not a year or 2. This is like decades. It was caused by the probable merging of continents but this remains a fact: There was many years if not decades of massive amounts of snow that never melted. Ice age is always interpreted as sub zero temps. 32 degrees is all it takes. The avg. temp of the world was drastically reduced but there still were season changes. We will never know how warm summer was. Maybe it was 30 maybe 50 in the equator region. It did warm up to start the thaw but never totally melted. This compacted the snow to "ice". The next year the same thing happened thus starting the ice age!
Moving continents also change the flow of water from one ocean to another and mountains affect the winds. So in many ways continental drift affects the climate. Eventually continental drift separates the continents, weathering wears down the mountains, and the climate goes back to its normal warm state. If continental drift happens in cycles, that would explain why ice ages seem to occur every 250 million years or so.
Another theory notes that sometimes in history there were mountains without an ice age. Perhaps changes outside the Earth also played a part in starting ice ages. Changes in the Sun or its movement round the Galaxy might have lessened the sunlight reaching the Earth. It takes about 250 million years for the Sun to travel once round the Galaxy. Coincidence?
Seeing it takes so long for these cycles to happen, it is reality we are in global warming. The weather does have patterns but it is very unlikely the avg. temp of the air and our oceans rise over a few decades so drastically. Just because we may be having a cold winter or more snow is masking the fact our environment is suffering from global warming. Earth does not lose 1/3 of its glaciers in just 1 or 2 decades. Ocean temps do not rise 2 degrees in 1 or 2 decades unless the sun moved out of position or a freak event happened.
Actually, I learned this neat stuff in geography.
