Several politicians enjoyed a field day this past week, touting the epic snowstorms in the northeast as evidence against global warming. With the onslaught of blizzards and knee-deep snow, the weather set the perfect stage for an assault on the credibility of climate change.

The Virginia Republican party took out a mocking television ad evoking images of the storm and inviting voters to call congressmen who voted for the climate bill to “tell them how much global warming you get this weekend. Maybe they’ll come help you shovel.”

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) even twittered that it is “going to keep snowing in D.C. until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’”

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), one of the most ardent skeptics to climate change, took the gleeful scorn even further, having his staffers build an igloo on Capitol Hill with a sign reading “Al Gore’s New Home.”

These publicity stunts have likely succeeded in driving public perception on the issue into further chaos. The salience of pointing out winter weather while it afflicts millions of Americans cannot be understated. As these congressmen point out, how can we worry about global warming when there is so much snow?

The problem, however, is that their reasoning is completely wrong.

These appeals to reject global warming science on the basis of this snowstorm come out of unscientific and unfounded logic. Not only does this snowstorm not actually disprove the science, but it actually confirms the predictions of climate models. Contrary to what the uninformed might think, “global warming,” or rather climate change, can lead to extreme conditions on both ends of the spectrum. In short, the hot places get hotter, the dry places get drier and snowy areas see more snow than ever.

The weather event in question actually lies perfectly within the expected trends of climate science. In fact, the U.S. Global Change Research Program predicted in 2009 that in the northeast, “strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.”

The science, as meteorologist Jeff Masters explains it, is simple. Warmer air from rising temperatures holds more moisture. Water vapor levels in the atmosphere have risen four percent since 1980, and when temperatures drop below freezing, that moisture will unleash itself in intensified snowstorms. Surely enough, these predicted blizzards have increased in severity. Three of the 10 heaviest snowstorms in Baltimore since 1870 have occurred in the last seven weeks.

These weather events, in their harsh confirmation of climate change predictions, should actually be sounding alarms about the urgent need for the Senate to pass a comprehensive climate bill. But instead, the outright duplicity of elected officials looking to score quick political points has led them to flaunt the exact opposite interpretation in the faces of the American people.

Their claims, making no attempt to rest on science, are extremely clever in their cynicism. Sarcastic jabs that do not even attempt to start a serious dialogue offer no real opportunity for rebuttal.

Unfortunately, politicians like Inhofe and DeMint count on the American people to pay attention just long enough to laugh at their witticisms and internalize the intuitive contradiction between intense snowstorms and global warming. Without the science on their side, opponents to climate legislation have made it clear that they will use any justification necessary to prevent legislative action on the issue. Poking fun at global warming science in the midst of a snowstorm might seem like fun and games, but with the Senate’s climate bill hanging in the balance, the stakes of public opinion are real and they are enormous. On this issue, like so many others, the American people deserve to hear the truth.