Is the "science" still "settled"?

Another blow to the supporters of MMGW-the snowpack in the Sierras has been pretty consistent since 1878:

Well, there’s another breakthrough today as the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting snowfall in the Sierras has remained consistent over a 130-year span despite the hysterical claims of those who’ve perpetrated this massive fraud on a gullible public.

The science has spoken an inconvenient truth.

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday.

The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.

“The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified,” said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It looks like you’re going to have snow for the foreseeable future.”

Naturally, those who claimed the debate over (because they said so) can now be called deniers.

Climate experts and water resources officials were immediately skeptical of the report, pointing out that it doesn’t come to a meaningful conclusion and uses data from a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.

Amateurs, huh? Like, say, a certain former vice president with zero scientific credentials?

Christy’s study used snow measurements from railroad officials, loggers, mining companies, hydroelectric utilities, water districts and government organizations going back to 1878. That’s when railroad workers began measuring the snowpack’s depth near the tracks at Echo Summit using a device similar to a yardstick.

“No one else had looked at this data in detail,” said Christy, a Fresno native who said some of the information will be published in the American Meteorological Society’s online Journal of Hydrometeorology.

Why that’s a peer-review journal, and wasn’t that the criteria that was supposed to refute the so-called skeptics back during ClimateGate? It’s peer-reviewed work(!), we were told, and we had no grounds to question such rigorous procedures, no? So now along comes a peer-reviewed report laying waste to the fanatical claims of amateurs like Gore, but we’re supposed to dismiss it. They want it both ways, but are no longer able to get away with it.