Vin Suprynowicz

A vicious cold snap engulfed much of the nation Thursday. Snow fell as far south as Alabama and Georgia.

That’s unusual.

Snow was piled so high in Iowa that drivers couldn’t see across intersections. A cold snap was expected to bring snow and ice Thursday to states from South Carolina to Louisiana. Forecasters said wind chills could drop to near zero at night.

Freeze warnings covered nearly all of Florida with temperatures expected to drop into the 20s. Iguanas were seen falling out of trees; experts say the cold-blooded reptiles become immobilized and lose their grip when the temperature falls into the 40s or below.

At least 15 deaths this year have been blamed on the cold and icy, snow-covered roads. An 88-year-old woman died of hypothermia in her unheated Chicago home; a homeless man was found dead in a tent in South Carolina.

That’s “South Carolina.”

In preparation for worsening conditions, more than 500 flights were grounded at Chicago’s airports. That’s fairly normal. In Atlanta, Delta Air Lines canceled nearly 200 flights scheduled to leave after 5 p.m. Thursday in anticipation of snow. That’s less normal. Frost on planes’ wings delayed seven early flights in Tampa, Fla. That’s weird.

Just one day into the 2010 legislative session, the Missouri Senate canceled its Thursday session because of weather.

With temperatures on the Texas-Mexico border expected to drop near freezing Thursday night, officials in Laredo — where January temperatures usually hover around 70 degrees — issued an advisory telling residents to “dress warmly and stay dry.”

Nor is the unseasonable weather limited to the United States. Europe is also in the deep freeze. Italians are fighting ice and snow in places they haven’t seen it in 30 years; the government has even sent relief helicopters to Sicily.

Yet just three weeks ago, on Dec. 20, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein wrote from Copenhagen — which was itself in the midst of a first-in-a-decade blizzard — “Experts say” piecemeal, voluntary efforts to “curb global warming … will never be enough without the kind of strong global agreement that eluded negotiators at the U.N. summit this past week in Copenhagen.

“Emissions of greenhouse gases keep rising and so do global temperatures,” reported a breathless Mr. Borenstein, who may or may not have been aware of hacked e-mails and computer files revealing “climate scientists” in the United States and Great Britain had worked to rig or invent much of their data to make “global warming” evidence “come out right.” (see coverage in World News Daily, or the National Review)

Meantime, “Analysis by the United Nations and outside management systems experts show that those voluntary reductions will not keep temperatures from increasing by more than 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit compared with now,” reported a breathless Mr. Borenstein, as he brushed the unseasonable Danish snow from his clothes.

“Good intentions aren’t enough,” the supposedly objective Dec. 20 AP report continued. “Upon announcement of the deal, a team of experts led by an MIT professor made quick calculations: The average global temperature is likely to rise 5.7 degrees F. above current temperatures. So the response from many, but not all, environmental activists and poorer nations was ‘not enough.’”

Now, for the record, one cold snap — even if it sets 20-year-records — doesn’t prove the earth’s macro-climate is or isn’t cooling.

But the spectacle of docile, politically correct reporters standing up to their waists in blizzard snowfalls, shouting over the shrieking wind to sternly warn that struggling taxpayers around the globe “aren’t sacrificing enough” to fight global warming — even to insist, with a wide-eyed sincerity that would do Pollyanna proud, that “global warming can sometimes cause these cold snaps” — is (depending on one’s mood) at least ironic, if not verging on the hilarious.

At this point, one suspects a vast southward migration of thousands of polar bears across a frozen Lake Huron to invade the suburbs of Detroit would merely be trumpeted as “one more sign of the vast disruptions being caused by … global warming.”