Remember acid rain?
Yeah they said back in the 80 that in 2000 + there will be no more trees left coz of acid rain...
Lemme check.. <<looks out the window>> Nope... Trees are fine at least the view in ireland, the once the god damn brits did not harvest for their ships.
acid rain was becoming a serious problem in the northeast US because of sulfer and other compounds coming out of coal burning power plants. but the power plants were forced to add scrubbers to their smoke stacks, removing most of the sulfur and the planet rebound nicely.
but a mild winter on the east coast or a harsh winter in Colorado are not evidence for or against global warming. the average temp of the entire planet, the oceans and the atmosphere, is what's increasing. a change of just a fraction of a degree world wide is enough to cause significant changes.
the oceans are a heat sink, and they are very big, so they can store a lot of energy. more energy in the oceans is then available to create bigger storms. That might mean more category 5 hurricanes, but it could also mean more blizzards.
there are things we can do to minimize or even reverse global warming. first is reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses we're pumping into the atmosphere. buy a car that gets 40 mpg or better. find alternatives to coal and natural gas power plants. improve the health of the forests, especially in tropical regions.
then there are large scale projects. there is too much energy in the air and in the ocean. wind mills and tidal mills convert energy to electricity. but we'd need 100k of them to have an effect.
if and when global warming is causing massive flooding and famine, we'll need regulate the amount of energy hitting the planet. NASA and others are doing research on how we might accomplish that. Using rail guns (an electric cannon) every few seconds, we could launch a few million sun shades to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the planet by a few percent.
