As Washingtonians finally dug themselves out Friday to brave clogged metro trains and icy roads on the way to the office, one of the lasting impacts of the past week is the discussions it has provoked about how climate change has impacted the current weather - and how this weather might impact the ongoing debate here over how the U.S. government should address the threat of climate change.

Dubbed the "snowpocalypse" - or sometimes "snowpocalypse II" in deference to the previous storm that blanketed Washington in December - the scenes on the streets this past week have actually seemed eerily post-apocalyptic. Silent, monochrome and empty, they have, for some, forebode a world in which no action is taken to stem the effects of climate change.

Others, though, see the wintry landscape as undermining the direness - or even the reality - of the threat posed by climate change, which they prefer to refer to as global warming, thus underscoring what they see as the incongruences between the phenomenon and the snowy spell.

On Wednesday, for example, climate change denier Sen. James Inhofe told The New York Times that the recent weather furthered doubts over whether climate change is "unequivocal" or a human-made phenomenon.

Fox News commentators likewise raised throughout the week what they felt was the "inconvenient" connection between the blizzard and the theory of global warming.

And conservative Republican Sen. Jim DeMint posted the comment "It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries 'uncle'" to his Twitter account Tuesday morning.

If anything, though, the weather should help discredit climate change deniers, contend major climate scientists and activists.