Dan Rather

This column comes to you from Dallas, where your reporter is waiting to see if he'll be able to proceed on to a Midwestern city where there's a story to be pursued. For now, it looks pretty dicey, with two converging storm systems bringing snow, ice, sleet and other unsavoury travel conditions to a large part of the Northeast and Midwest.

Here at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where the weather outside is an unseasonably cold 30 degrees, fellow would-be passengers periodically lift themselves from their seats to check the departure board. Then they trudge back. The young man sitting next to me at the gate, a slim, blue-suited businessman somewhere in his mid-30s, hopes to make it home in time for a special dinner with his wife, with whom he checks in periodically via cellphone. Across the aisle, a family sprawls across several seats, infant child beginning to squall. It's your typical planes, trains and automobiles travel fiasco.

'Global climate change'

This year, however, this winter travel ritual isn't all that typical. We've had relatively few of these itinerary-scrambling winter storm systems, especially in the Northeast. Surfing the Web, I see that the Drudge Report is marking the occasion with intimations of global-warming irony. "HEARING ON 'WARMING OF PLANET' CANCELLED," one headline announces, "BECAUSE OF ICE STORM." Another tells of a St. Louis-area screening of Al Gore's global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth being called off because of a snowstorm. The implicit message seems clear enough: How seriously can we take this global-warming stuff when a rampaging nor'easter is dumping snow and freezing rain on us?

There's a Robert Mankoff cartoon in this week's New Yorker magazine that shows two bundled-up men walking on a city sidewalk. "Long term," one says to the other, "I'm worried about global warming; short term, about freezing my ... off." It's funny, as they say, because it's true. What's more, the cartoon - unlike the Drudge headlines - gets the relationship between weather and climate right. One cold snap in the middle of February - or even July, for that matter - does not a mockery of global warming make.

Or perhaps we should say, instead, 'global climate change', a term that seems to be gradually gaining favour in political and media circles. It may not impart the same sense of menace as "global warming" (at least not in certain latitudes; by some accounts the Russians, with their vast frozen wastes, are somewhat less alarmed than the rest of us about the prospect of things heating up a bit) - but it might be more accurate.

Climate is not weather. Climate is the context in which weather takes place. And as the climate changes - which, regardless of what one regards as the proximate cause, has been happening in recent years - we can predict that the weather in various regions will change, too. What is considerably harder to predict - because the Earth, its oceans and its atmosphere comprise such a complex and interdependent system - is just what, exactly, the changes will be. Some regions might experience generally higher temperatures, while others might actually get colder.

One thing we're hearing, though, is, whatever the weather, we can expect it to be more extreme. More powerful storms, more dramatic temperature swings and, presumably, more days like this one to snarl travel throughout broad swaths of the country. So call it global climate change, put on your coat and don't fall into the trap of thinking that a few inches of snow means it isn't real.