President Barack Obama, his Cabinet and Democrats in Congress who think it's important to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases from fossil fuels have talked about how transforming our use of energy can produce jobs. Climate change, which along with dependency on fossil fuels is the key reason for the transformation, gets almost no mention.

In the State of the Union speech, Obama never uttered the words "climate change" or "global warming."

Scientists describe many effects of a warming climate if emissions continue unabated and some of them have serious implications for fisheries, agriculture, habitation and health. But snow? Don't throw the shovels out.

Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters explained on his WunderBlog last week that big snowstorms don't indicate that global warming isn't happening.

So far the global average temperature has warmed an average 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, with bigger changes nearer the poles. And there's even more warming still in the pipeline. "There will still be colder than average winters in a world that is experiencing warming, with plenty of opportunities for snow," Masters wrote.

The latest report on climate change by federal scientists, "Global Climate Change Impacts in the U.S.," said precipitation has increased by an average of about 5 percent in the past 50 years. It projects that northern areas generally will become wetter, and southern areas, especially in the West, will become drier.

Meanwhile, two current ocean and atmosphere patterns help explain winter cold and snow.

The climate phenomenon La Nina is linked to a cooling in sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. Its opposite is El Nino, the warming of those waters.

La Nina is mainly responsible for this year's weather patterns, said Ignatius Rigor, an atmospheric scientist at the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington.

La Nina was expected to bring more snow to the Pacific Northwest, much of the Upper Midwest and New England.

Read the complete story from The Miami Herald.