Everything cold is new again
Lily Tomlin once asked “What’s the point of being a hedonist if you’re not having a good time?”
And it seems equally futile to have the hottest years ever crowding in on you like a fiery furnace if you’re freezing your fish and chips off and going through a painful energy transition where you don’t have energy.
Yet Bloomberg reports that “UK Power Prices Skyrocket as Freezing Weather Tightens Market” while MSN says “At least six dead as winter storm paralyzes the US”. Who saw that one coming?
At least we didn’t get that evasive “cold snap” this time. No, this time it was a “spell”, as an American outlet said “Rescuers evacuated people Monday from flooded homes and stranded cars as a soggy and cold spell continued to disrupt life across parts of the U.K.” and a British paper warned of a foot or more of snow from Colorado to Vermont.
But not a climate in sight “With temperatures dipping below freezing in many places” and “Snow and ice warnings were in place for most of the U.K.” And in some places in the U.S., record snowfall.
Notwithstanding the end of winter and the hottest year ever it sure feels a lot like winter, for which climate-obsessed governments were ill-prepared:
“Heavy snow and freezing rain brought widespread disruption across Europe on Sunday, particularly in the U.K. and Germany, with several major airports forced to suspend flights.
With the weather set to stay inclement on Sunday in the U.K., there are concerns that many rural communities, particularly in the north of England, could be cut off, with up to 40 centimeters (15 inches) of snow on the ground above 300 meters (985 feet).
The National Grid, which oversees the country’s electricity network, said it had been working to restore power. Outages were reported in the English cities of Birmingham and Bristol and in Cardiff, Wales.”
And dangerous winter at that.
Sorry, did we say Colorado to Vermont? A second storm with similar impact was bearing down on states from Kansas to Ohio, and then on to Missouri, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
Plus Virginia and North Carolina. Plus Indiana. Oh, and “A destructive ice storm could pummel southeastern Kansas to southern Missouri, southern Illinois and southern and central Kentucky”. Other than that, the end of winter is nigh.
Yes, Virginia, there is a snowstorm. Indeed, with alarmists predicting the end of winter and insisting that snow is disappearing (for instance item 2 here), MSN somehow weirdly tells us “US map reveals monster winter storm bringing the most snow in a decade”.
Oh, and the Canadian Press blames the dreaded “polar vortex” for an “Arctic blast” that:
“brought subfreezing temperatures Tuesday to some of the southernmost points of the U.S., threatening to dump snow on parts of Texas and Oklahoma in coming days and contributing to a power outage in Virginia’s capital that made the water unsafe to drink.”
Did they dare mention climate? Um not exactly. But the CP story did insist that:
“The polar vortex of ultra-cold air usually spins around the North Pole, but it sometimes plunges south into the U.S., Europe and Asia. Some experts say such cold air outbreaks are happening more frequently, paradoxically, because of a warming world.”
We should probably be grateful that it was just “some experts” rather than “experts”. And we chased the link through an AP story that said it wasn’t really a polar vortex but was, and as the Arctic warms “four times faster than the rest of the world” cold Arctic air spreads, and it’s just “a couple of weeks of weather” but also climate lasting “years and decades”, and from that word salad to a paper by 20 authors (safety in numbers?) that called for more research grants to use fancy computers to make up for the shortcomings in the real world:
“A physical explanation of the two-way vertical coupling process between the polar vortex and blocking highs, taking into account local surface conditions, remains elusive. We conclude that evidence exists for tropical preconditioning of Arctic-midlatitude climate linkages.
Recent research using very large-ensemble climate modelling provides an emerging opportunity to robustly quantify internal atmospheric variability when studying the potential response of midlatitude CAOs to AA and sea-ice loss.”
So they don’t know what’s happening. But it is climate so send money.
P.S. NBC says “The first winter storm of 2025 was deadly and disruptive, killing at least four people, shutting down roadways in the Great Plains, leaving thousands without power and producing record snow in the Great Plains before aiming its destruction at the dense cities of the East Coast.”
And we must point out, yet again, that while all sorts of weather extremes are inconvenient, unpleasant and even dangerous, cold remains more deadly than heat, especially if the power goes out.
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