With a cold winter that saw Washington, D.C., immobilized for days following a heavy snowfall and people in Atlanta wearing mittens, it’s easy to take the position that global warming is just a mirage in Al Gore’s eye, says capecodonline.com

And in fact, because of the unseasonably low temperatures in the South, many naysayers have had a field day mocking predictions that the Earth is warming.

But make no mistake, the Earth is indeed well into a warming trend and scientific evidence makes it very clear that, despite the recent cold temperatures, the Earth at both poles is losing its cool.

Calling global warming a hoax flies in the face of most scientific evidence. Even without assigning a cause to why Earth temperatures are on the increase, it’s clear from the data that our weather is not what our grandparents experienced.

In 2007, polar ice in the Arctic decreased by about 386,000 square miles, an area the size of Texas and Arizona combined.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA, the maximum extent of the winter sea ice cover for 2008-2009 was the fifth lowest on record, making the Arctic cap half the size it was 50 years ago.

A reduced ice mass allows the sea to absorb more of the sun’s rays, thereby accelerating the rate of overall warming in the high latitudes. This heating of the Arctic waters has a direct effect on the Gulf Stream, slowing its northward transfer of thermal energy from the equator. Scientists have noted that in the past 12 years the flow has diminished about 30 percent.

Ironically, this decrease may be the very reason why New England has been experiencing colder temperatures of late.

At the southern end of the planet, the Antarctic ice shelf is also disintegrating. Large sections have collapsed and the annual melt season has increased by two to three weeks over the past 20 years. The ice retreat is attributed to the region’s strong warming trend, almost 5 degrees in the last 50 years, a rate five times the global average.

The temperature rise in both polar regions may well be perfectly natural. And while scientific evidence shows that concentrations of greenhouse gasses like CO2 and methane are higher now than at any time in the past 600,000 years, it could be that other factors are also at play here. Scientists recognize that over long periods there are natural oscillations in the Earth’s temperature. But this is no reason to take the position that global warming is a hoax.

Part of the problem is that critics fail to distinguish between weather change and climate change. Weather is a measurement of conditions in a specific atmospheric area over a relatively short time period. Climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over much longer periods of time and it reflects changes in long-term averages of daily weather. The distinction is important because unless it is understood, the arguments about global warming can stray from science, becoming hostage to political ideologies and simplistic reasoning.

We may argue about the causes of climate change, but to deny that it exists is folly of the greatest sort.