With the East Coast experiencing widespread snowfall, the climate-change controversy has intensified yet again, with the climate scientists and the skeptics of global warming using the record-setting snows to reinforce their respective viewpoints.

Of late, the global warming critics have been attacking the academic integrity of some climate scientists, especially after hacking of the e-mail messages and documents pertaining to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2007.

While the critics are scorning those who warn of hazardous human-driven climate change, the climate scientists reiterate that the wild storms substantiate the forecasts that the excessive heating of the Earth will lead to more recurrent and more severe weather events.

Joining the controversy, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, the chief climate skeptic in Congress, has said that the extreme weather has underlined the scientists’ ‘doubtful’ conclusions that global warming is “unequivocal” and results from human activity. However, Joseph Romm, a climate-change expert and an ex-Energy Department official has refuted the argument.

Calling the climate-change debates a “PR war,” Nobel peace prize-winning physicist Sir John Houghton, co-chairman of the IPCC scientific assessment group for 14 years, said that the growing skepticism about global warming “comes from the United States, from vested interests… which employ thousands of lobbyists in Washington to try and influence members of Congress that climate change is not happening.”