Are colder temperatures evidence for Global Warming & why?

Factual Questions
1

Hi,
Sometimes people mention record cold temperatures when they’re talking about evidence for global warming. I was wondering if that really is evidence for global warming, and if it is, could you explain why it is? (Note that I’m not an opponent of the theory)

2

Kind of off-topic, but I think it’s pretty much established that global warming is happening. The question is how much humans have to do with it, if at all.

3

While global warming means that the average temperature of the planet as a whole is going up, that doesn’t mean that certain regions couldn’t have lower temperatures as a result of changed weather patterns.

For example, Britain has a much warmer climate for it’s latitude than it otherwise would due to the Gulf Stream. One of the wilder claims is that global warming will cause the Gulf Stream to cease, causing Britain’s climate to become more like Scandinavia’s. Or if the Arctic Ocean loses it’s icepack, northern Russia and Siberia could paradoxically have worse winters due to increased snowfall.

4

And the preferred term these days is no longer “global warming” but global climate change", IIRC. Makes more sense, frankly. Many more things will change than just the overall average world temperature going up a (significant) bit.

5

A few years ago I regularly saw articles that indicated that global warming (let’s stick to the term because it’s easier to search on and get cites) would contribute to more extreme weather including, occasionally, cold and snow.

I couldn’t find anything out there today that supported the notion, although reports of extremes of storms and other violent phenomena are easier to find.

Lumpy may be referring to claims such as in The Great Climate Flip-Flop, by William H. Calvin in the January 1998 Atlantic magazine:

It’s also hard to find info that doesn’t include an ideological slant one way or the other.

Finding out about global warming and climate change is a two-year-old links page that has a ton of good stuff on it, though the usual problem of dead links rears its head.

6

This is the site I use. It has the latest news stories from around the world.
http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=world&cat=global_warming