Since you asked... it's what climate change theory predicts.
"Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt.
Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.
...Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog, said that the recent snows do not, by themselves, demonstrate anything about the long-term trajectory of the planet. Climate is, by definition, a measure of decades and centuries, not months or years.
But Dr. Masters also said that government and academic studies had
consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just these kinds of record-setting storms, because warmer air carries more moisture." (from NYTimes article)
Global warming leads to warmer temperatures so more moisture in air, which leads to larger storms.
Somehow people get the idea that global warming is only true if it never gets below 50°...
No, global warming is a complex global phenomenon, caused by human activity, which leads to a variety of "surprising" (to many) results, including more severest storms (including blizzards)
However, no single weather event - rather it be a snowstorm in the mid-Atlantic, or a 80° day in northern Norway for the first time in a lifetime, is in itself proof or disproof of a theory. "Both climate-change contrarians and climate-change scientists agree that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change."
Its the preponderance of events, like arctic ice melting, or the fact that 3 of the world's warmest years have occurred in the last decade, or that the climate of New England is becoming more temperate and the seasons longer, that point to global warming. And its a second bit of evidence (referred to as a trick by a climate researcher and thus leading to accusations of lying when he meant trick to mean "putting two different data sets together") that connects human activity to climate change - for example - rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Read more on the debate here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/sc...ml?ref=science