Blizzard of contradictions: Colorado headlines spark climate credibility questions

By Brian C. Joondeph | Commentary, American Thinker

Open the Denver Post and you might experience intellectual whiplash.

In one article, readers are warned that Colorado ski resorts face an uncertain future due to climate change, with “less reliable powder days” threatening the industry. Resorts must invest in snowmaking, diversify revenue streams, and brace for a warming planet.

Right beside it? A forecast of more than two feet of snow for Colorado’s mountain peaks.

Two feet.

Screenshot The Denver Post February 16, 2026 // fair use

Apparently, the climate crisis is now capable of producing both the imminent demise of snow and an old-fashioned Rocky Mountain blizzard. Sometimes on the same page.

This is not satire. It’s modern climate journalism.

Climate journalism is actually a thing. The Washington Post employed 24-30 such journalists and recently laid off 14 of them. Maybe their new slogan should be “Climate Alarmism Dies in Darkness.”

We are told skiing is endangered by global warming, that snow seasons are shrinking, that resorts must adapt or perish. Yet every winter seems to bring headlines about record snowfalls somewhere in the West. Just two seasons ago, California experienced record Sierra snowpack, twice the average. 

Colorado has enjoyed several strong seasons in recent years. Across the country, upstate New York measured snowfall in feet, not inches. Atmospheric rivers dump historic moisture into lake-effect snow machine guns.

And yet, the narrative remains: snow is disappearing.

The problem is not that weather varies. It always has. The problem is that whatever happens is now cited as evidence of climate catastrophe.

If it snows less than average — climate change.

If it snows more than average — climate change.

If temperatures rise — climate change.

If temperatures plunge — climate change.

If drought hits — climate change.

If floods come — climate change.

At this point, climate change has become less a scientific hypothesis and more a theological doctrine: omnipresent, unfalsifiable, and invoked to explain all things. 

Author Michael Crichton asserted that environmentalism transformed into “one of the most powerful religions in the Western World.” We must repent to the false climate gods for salvation.

Now it’s the end of snow. This isn’t new. 

In 2014, The New York Times ran an op-ed lamenting “The End of Snow,” warning that skiing, particularly in places like Colorado, was imperiled by global warming. The implication was clear: snow would soon become a relic of a bygone era.

With the hubris of Greta Thunberg, the New York Times writer, Porter Fox, assured readers, “This is no longer a scientific debate. It is scientific fact.”

Twelve years later, Colorado’s mountains are still very much white in winter. Resorts are packed. Lift lines remain long. Epic and Ikon passes continue selling briskly. Snowmaking technology has improved. And, inconveniently, storms still deliver multiple feet of powder at a time.

Less than a week after the Denver Post’s lament over the lack of snow, they ran an article cheering “Staggering snow totals lift spirits at southern Colorado ski resorts.” And they did it with a straight face.

Predictions of snow’s demise join a long list of apocalyptic climate forecasts that have failed to materialize on schedule. From disappearing ice caps and permanently ice-free Arctic summers to submerged coastlines and climate refugees in the hundreds of millions. The timeline keeps shifting. The catastrophe is always imminent — just not yet.

The irony of pairing “less reliable powder days” with “two feet of snow forecast” would be amusing if it weren’t so emblematic of a larger problem: climate alarmism has become narrative-driven rather than evidence-driven.

Lost in today’s breathless reporting is an inconvenient geological fact: Earth’s climate has never been static. Climate change has been a constant part of the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.

Around 7,000 years ago, during the Holocene Climate Optimum, parts of Greenland were significantly warmer than today. Hence the name Greenland. Long before SUVs and coal plants, temperatures fluctuated.

Arctic regions supported vegetation beyond their present limits. Palm trees once grew in the Canadian Arctic. Sea turtles once populated the Arctic Ocean.

Ten thousand years ago, Chicago and much of the Great Lakes region were buried beneath a mile-thick ice sheet. That ice melted, unaided by internal combustion engines, coal-fired power plants, or plastic straws. Sea levels rose dramatically as the last Ice Age ended.

The climate changed. It always has. It always will. 

This does not mean humans have zero impact on the climate. It means that climate systems are vast, complex, and influenced by solar cycles, ocean currents, volcanic activity, orbital variations, and countless other natural forces operating over centuries and millennia.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged the complexity, “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

To attribute every blizzard or dry spell to modern industrial society is not science. It is narrative convenience. It is media gaslighting. 

We are routinely told not to confuse weather with climate. A cold winter, we are reminded, does not disprove global warming.

Fair enough. But a warm winter doesn’t prove it, either. 

That standard is applied selectively. When ski resorts invest in snowmaking, it is presented as proof of systemic climate deterioration. When a warm January occurs, it is framed as evidence of a broader trend.

When two feet of snow are forecast, however, that is merely “weather.”

The asymmetry is telling. The doomsayers want it both ways.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT THE AMERICAN THINKER

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.