As cold hits, Trump asks, where’s global warming? Scientists say it’s still here

As much of the United States faces numbing cold, dangerous ice and heavy snow due to a massive winter storm, President Donald Trump has used social media to challenge the fact that the world is warming.

In a 25-word post on his Truth Social account, the president on Friday questioned how the world could get warmer when it’s so cold, and called the temperatures nearly unprecedented. He also called advocates and scientists “environmental insurgents.”

More than a dozen scientists told The Associated Press on Friday that the president’s claims were false. They point out that even in a warmer world, winter and cold occur, and they have never said otherwise. They note that while it is cold in the eastern United States, more of the world is warmer than average. They also highlighted the difference between daily, local weather and long-term climate change on a planetary scale.

Meteorologists also said global warming over the past two decades could make this cold appear unprecedented and record-breaking. But government records show it was much colder in the past.

“This social media post packs a remarkable amount of inflammatory language and factually inaccurate claims into a very short statement,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain of the California Water Resources Institute. “First, global warming continues – and has in fact progressed at an accelerating rate in recent years. »

Here’s a closer look at the facts:

Climate change is still here

TRUMP: “WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING??? »

THE FACTS: “Global warming hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s here,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University.

The past three years have been the warmest on record, increasing at a much faster rate than before, data shows.

Globally, winter temperatures – December, January and February – have increased 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit (0.72 degrees Celsius) since 1995, with the previous two winters being the warmest on record, according to records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The United States has warmed more slowly than the rest of the world, about half a degree Fahrenheit (0.28 degrees Celsius) since 1995. Last month was the fifth warmest December on record globally and in the United States.

Local cold differs from longer-term global warming

Scientists note that they speak of “global” when it comes to warming. The United States is only 2% of the Earth’s land area – and west of the Rockies, it’s not that cold for this time of year. Global temperature maps show that two-thirds of the United States is several degrees colder than normal and the same is true for Russia. But Australia, Africa, the Arctic, Antarctica, Asia, Canada, much of Europe and even Greenland are warmer than normal.

“Even as the Earth warms, cold days and cold winters are not expected to disappear, they will just become fewer,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “Moreover, what happens in the United States over a brief period of a few days is not an indication of what happens to the United States as a whole or to Earth as a whole in the long term.”

There’s even a theory among many scientists — but not yet consensus — that the American East is facing more extreme winter outbreaks due to Arctic warming, which is part of climate change.

“This is an active and uncertain area of ​​research,” said Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University. “One hypothesis is that Arctic warming reduces the temperature contrast between the poles and midlatitudes, which can sometimes weaken or distort the jet stream and allow cold Arctic air to spread southward. That said, not all cold outbreaks can or should be attributed to climate change. The weather still has a lot of natural variability.”

It was colder in the past

TRUMP: “Record cold snap expected to impact 40 states. We’ve rarely seen anything like this before.”

THE FACTS: Yes, we did.

The National Weather Service predicts that in Minneapolis it will be -11 degrees Saturday (minus-24 degrees Celsius) and minus-13 (minus-25 degrees Celsius) on Sunday, but that’s a far cry from the records of minus-33 and minus-31 (minus-36 and minus-35 degrees Celsius) set there in 1904. Chicago is expected to drop to 2 degrees (minus-17 Celsius) on Saturday and 8 degrees (minus-13 Celsius) on Sunday, but records for those Days have been minus-15 and minus-20 (minus-26 and minus-29 Celsius) since 1897 and as recently as January 30, 2019, it reached minus-23 (minus-31 Celsius) in Chicago. Fargo, North Dakota and Washington, D.C. are not expected to be within a dozen degrees of the coldest day on record.

“Truly historic cold spells, like those of 1978-79, 1983-85 or earlier decades, were often colder and more persistent over large areas,” Gensini said. “We are also less accustomed to intense cold today, as winters are warmer overall than they were decades ago. »

Don’t expect too many broken records

Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at Climate Central, said a check of U.S. weather stations with at least 50 years of data found 45 record lows set in January of this year, compared to 1,092 records.

Although some daily records could fall, including in the Plains, Texas and Louisiana, it will be “very difficult to break records over a long period of time (100-plus years) with this cold blast,” said Ryan Maue, who was NOAA’s chief scientist at the end of Trump’s first term. Maue predicts that on Monday, the lower 48 states will average a low of 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus -12 degrees Celsius) with more than 90% of the country below freezing. But in January 1985, the average temperature in the Lower 48 was 4.1 degrees (minus -15.5 degrees Celsius), Maue tweeted.

Maue praised Trump for “appropriately warning about impending severe cold. In a roundabout way, while he trolls about global warming, it seems to be on his mind.”

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