Western Washington got a rare surprise this past month. A snowfall, more commonly encountered further east, blanketed the area, resulting in school closings and impassable roads.

Despite criticism of Seattle’s response to the event, it begs a more important question: Doesn’t a snowy Western Washington disprove global warming? How can climate change be true when rainy Seattle turns into a veritable winter wonderland?

While the Great Seattle Snow Fiesta of 2008 neither proves nor disproves global warming, it does highlight the potential damage of a changing climate and provides an ominous warning about our ability to respond to climatic events.

It is hard to determine if a single storm is part of a growing trend or simply an outlier. Extreme weather is a natural occurrence that regularly takes place in many areas, and the Pacific Northwest is no stranger to this form of weather. The past two years alone have given us the great coastal gusts of Dec. 1-3, 2007 and the Hanukkah-Eve Wind Storm of 2006. Strong Pacific Northwest storms have been recorded as far back as 1880.

The prevailing wisdom is that those anxious about climate change are solely concerned with small temperature increases and melting icecaps, and are portrayed as being more worried about saving polar bears than people. The truth is, climate change is likely to have as much of an effect on humans as it does on polar bears. For example, an increase in extreme and varied weather, like what Seattle has experienced, is one of the important effects of climate change that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified.

The precise effects of global warming will be different in each region. The Pacific Northwest has a strange climate for its location. For example, the city of Fargo, N.D., is at about the same latitude as Seattle, but it is much colder. If it were not for the protection provided by the Cascade range combined with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, Seattle would have the colder and dryer climate of Eastern Washington and Montana. Although it is unlikely, it is not impossible for a warming world to cause a snowy Seattle.

The recent snowstorm shows why climate change is so troubling. Had the snow fallen over the course of months instead of weeks or been a regular occurrence in the area, then the damage would have been minimal. This amount of snow has consistently blanketed major cities such as Detroit and Minneapolis without causing similar disruption. Humans are very good at adapting to climates from frozen tundra to desolate deserts, but we are not so good at adapting to quickly-changing climates.

This is the real concern about global warming, global cooling or any climate-change event. Given sufficient time, coastal residents can be relocated, new water supplies can be found or more heating sources can be constructed with minimal disruption and damage. Cram a century’s worth of climatic movement into a decade’s time, however, and you get massive problems.

The push for green technologies and low carbon lifestyles are not an attempt to bankrupt the United States, but an attempt to prevent the events in the apocalyptic climate movie The Day After Tomorrow from becoming true. Simply slowing down our carbon emissions may be enough to forestall an environmental catastrophe. As long as humanity can adapt faster than the changing climate, we should survive relatively unscathed.

Reach columnist Mike Noon at opinion@dailyuw.com.