Why do cold snaps persist if the Earth is warming? This question has popped up in various forms online, especially on social media. Climate contrarians often use it as a rhetorical question to make the false claim that ‘global warming must not be happening if we still experience cold weather’.
Others may ask this question out of genuine curiosity – after all, it might be confusing to hear that the planet is warming if you are shivering in a cold spell.
But does anything actually prevent global warming and cold snaps from coexisting? Not at all. Cold snaps (short periods of very cold weather) occur when there are large southward dips in the jet stream – strong winds 5 to 7 miles (8 to 11 kilometers) above Earth’s surface that blow west to east
We’ve had to constantly explain this to climate deniers for decades. It doesn’t matter though.
It’s why we for the most part stopped calling it global warming and starting calling it climate change. So idiots wouldn’t walk into the US house of representatives holding a snowball to disprove “global warming” …
Exactly , also when we look at the probability density curve for observed temperatures and how they are predicted to change in the future, we see a shift towards warmer temperatures in average, which would mean more hot and less cold conditions. But at the same time the variance increases which is flattening the curve. The result is much more (extreme) hot weather and no (or much less) change in cold temperatures.
The polar jet stream becomes unstable during climate change, and whips around more dramatically than it ever used to, sending polar arctic air far south.
