The Gore Effect brings snow to New York City

Michael Daly

Sunday, December 20th 2009, 4:00 AM

Hong/AP

Lately it seems that global warming advocate Al Gore brings a touch of winter wherever he goes.

The first flakes fell in the city just after 1 p.m., each a unique and intricate crystal so delicate it could survive only an instant on an open palm, but signaling the arrival of power so great it had forced even the President to change his plans.

Those of us whose thinking tends more toward the magical than the scientific might see the storm as the latest manifestation of a phenomenon named after a man who just missed becoming President.

Al Gore has since become the clarion-in-chief about the dangers of global warning. His detractors delight in noting coincidences between events relating to his favorite subject and severe winter weather.

These coincidences have been termed the Gore effect and they date back nearly six years, to a speech on global warming at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan that was accompanied by arctic, near-record cold.

In 2006, Gore spoke about global warming in Australia two weeks before the start of summer and it snowed.

Gore spoke at Harvard in October of 2008 and the temperature neared a record low set more than a century before.

And so it went, right up to January of this year, when an ice storm accompanied his testimony about global warming before a Senate committee.

The weather resulted in a snow day at the school where the Obama girls were newly enrolled, causing the President to suggest the nation's capital had punked.

"We're going to have to try to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town," the President said.

The Gore effect seemed to strike wimpy Washington again in March, when a snowstorm caused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to cancel an appearance at a global warming rally on the Capitol grounds.

And last week, the Gore effect seemed to follow Obama as well as Pelosi and a big congressional delegation to the global warming summit in Copenhagen.

They arrived to 4 inches of freshly fallen snow. The forecasters were promising the first white Christmas there in 14 years.

As our representatives worked out a toothless agreement they termed "an unprecedented breakthrough," meteorologists were forecasting a big snowstorm back home.

Pelosi and the congressional delegation cut the trip short to beat the snow. Obama stayed a little longer, but even an adopted son of flinty Chicago ended up departing early.

"Because of weather constraints in Washington, I am leaving before the final vote," the President said.

Obama landed at Andrews Air Force base at 1 a.m. Saturday and the encroaching weather led him to take a motorcade rather than the usual helicopter hop to the White House.