Maybe Barack Obama hasn’t read the memo yet, but anthropogenic global warming has come under a lot of unpleasant scrutiny lately — and hasn’t exactly come through it smelling like a rose. Still, Obama chose yesterday to announce the launch of a brand-new government bureaucracy to investigate AGW. Just that might be enough to qualify as an Obamateurism, but yesterday’s announcement had an extra added sense of timing:

NOAA, part of the Department of Commerce, is going to be providing information to individuals and decision-makers through a new NOAA Climate Service office. “More and more, Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards, including sea-level rise, longer growing seasons, changes in river flows, increases in heavy downpours, earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons in our waters. People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decision-making about virtually all aspects of their lives,” the release says.

Earlier snowmelt? That would be nice.

Turns out the release was planned prepared ahead of the snowstorm, which shut federal agencies today and forced its senders to hold a press conference by telephone instead of at the National Press Club.

That, as Jim Geraghty explains, put it in a class of its own:

I’m sure the turnout at the press conference would have been greater if the entire Washington metro area weren’t coated in more white powder than a cartel processing room, with another ten inches or more of Winter Slurpee coming our way. Hey, guys? When schools like Loudoun are announcing they’ll still be closed four days from now, everybody’s got less time to worry about how warm we’ll be a hundred years from now.

There’s no better time than in the middle of the worst snow dump in the mid-Atlantic region for the last couple of decades to announce a new agency to protect us against global warming.  They closed down federal offices on the same day the White House scheduled this launch.  Hopefully, phoning it in is all the new bureaucracy will be doing.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!