Snowstorms can cause serious headaches for politicians, as Chris Christie and Mike Bloomberg discovered anew after last month’s Boxing Day Blizzard. Rhode Island officials learned the same lesson – painfully – after the famous December debacle of 2007.

With my colleague Tony Petrarca and our other WPRI meteorologists forecasting a major Nor’easter to hit Rhode Island early Wednesday morning, the Chafee administration is set to get its first big test from Mother Nature just a week after taking office. When I called spokesman Mike Trainor earlier tonight, he couldn’t talk because he was on a conference call with the R.I. Emergency Management Agency.

Chafee loved running a city – heard about how he used to be mayor of Warwick? – so managing the response to a big storm could be right up his alley. Or he could get the blame when schoolchildren are stranded on I-95.

Either way, storms are one of those relatively rare times when average citizens experience government firsthand – the DMV is another one – so the Chafee folks would be well advised to be on their game this week, no matter how the storm turns out.

The Boxing Day Blizzard is pretty much over, and people are continuing to clean up from the storm – check out my afternoon WPRI.com story for more information and head to our home page for lots of other details.

The New York Times op-ed page had a slightly contrarian take on the weather over the weekend. Judah Cohen, who heads up an environmental research firm in Massachusetts, says the wintry conditions are actually a sign of global warming:

That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.

I was actually thinking a little about this myself yesterday, remembering my days as an environmental reporter. It also shows why it’s probably more accurate to call the phenomenon in question “climate change” instead of “global warming.”