Recent cold spell hasn’t frozen out climate change

donald trump snowman during cold weather climate change debate

Whenever we have a snowstorm in America, people like Donald Trump and climate change disbelievers love to point out that if it snows, that means the mountains of science is pure bunk. It’s been continually proven that the higher rate of climate change caused more extreme weather like numerous hurricanes per year along with extreme cold and hot temperatures. Sound familiar?

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. And the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA) reports that recent decades have been the warmest since at least around 1000 A.D., and that the warming we’ve seen since the late 19th century is unprecedented over the last 1,000 years.

In the midst of a Midwest cold spell, Trump is pleading for global warming to come back, but it never went away.

climate change map showing weather changes in midwest us

Just like the Arctic air invading parts of the U.S. because of wandering pieces of the polar vortex, Earth’s warmth appears a bit temporarily displaced.

But scientific reports issued by the Trump administration and outside climate scientists contradict Trump’s suggestion that global warming can’t exist if it’s cold outside.

A look at his Monday night tweet:

TRUMP: “In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming (sic)? Please come back fast, we need you!”

THE FACTS:

While the Midwest is in the grip of a chill that’s likely to set records, Earth is still considerably warmer than it was 30 years ago and especially 100 years ago.

The lower 48 states make up only 1.6 percent of the globe and five western states are warmer than normal. The Earth as a whole — and it is global warming, not U.S. warming — on Tuesday is 0.54 degrees (0.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average and 1.6 degrees warmer than it was on average about 100 years ago, according to data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer and NASA.


Around Minnesota, winters just aren’t as cold as they used to be. DNR climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld produced this graphic showing how Grand Rapids is losing its coldest temperature readings, which are usually collected overnight. The 1930s was something of an anomaly, he said, because the drought years caused colder temperatures. Source: Minnesota DNR

“This is simply an extreme weather event and not representative of global scale temperature trends,” said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini, who is in the midst of some of the worst subfreezing cold. “The exact opposite is happening in Australia right now.”

Australia is broiling with triple-digit heat that is setting records opposite the Midwest. Adelaide last week was 115.9 degrees (46.6 Celsius), setting the record for the highest temperature ever set by a major Australian city.

Trump is cherry picking cold weather to ignore the larger picture of a warming planet, said John Cook, a professor of climate change communications at George Mason University.

“This myth is like arguing that nighttime proves the sun doesn’t exist,” Cook said.

As far as how it affects people, Trump’s own administration released a scientific report last year saying that while human-caused climate change will reduce cold weather deaths “in 49 large cities in the United States, changes in extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures are projected to result in more than 9,000 additional premature deaths per year” by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at recent rates.

Even with global warming, winter, snowstorms and cold weather will continue to exist, say scientists and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s because Trump is conflating weather and climate. Weather is like mood, which is fleeting. Climate is like personality, which is long term and over large areas the size of continents, hemispheres and the planet.

“In a warming world, you’re still going to have unusually hot and unusually cold events happening in a particular part of the world,” said Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. “Weather is not going away.”