A brutal Arctic outbreak has plunged much of the United States into subzero wind chills, snarling travel and straining power grids just as President Donald Trump seizes on the deep freeze to question whether the planet is really warming. His latest barbs, delivered both online and from high-profile stages, have drawn a swift and unusually unified response from climate scientists who say the cold snap is weather, not proof that global warming has vanished.
Trump’s argument hinges on a simple intuition, that if people are shivering, the world cannot be heating up. Researchers counter that this intuition is wrong, pointing to decades of data that show rising global temperatures, shrinking ice and shifting storm patterns even as occasional record cold still grips parts of the country.
Trump’s deep-freeze taunt and the political stage he chose
As forecasters warned that a massive winter storm would sweep across the country, President Donald Trump used his Truth Social megaphone to scoff at the science of Climate and to revive a familiar line of attack. In a 25 word post, the president on Friday asked, in all caps, “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”, turning a life threatening cold wave into a punchline for his supporters and a provocation for researchers who have spent years explaining why short term chill does not erase long term warming trends, according to detailed TRUMP fact checks. The same message framed environmental advocates as enemies, with Trump asking, “Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???” in a post that mocked what he called the Climate Change Hoax and cast doubt on warnings that rising temperatures are “an existential threat,” as quoted in a widely shared Could the Environmental post.
The president has not confined his skepticism to social media. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump appeared at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, using the elite gathering to deride climate activists and to question whether the world is really warming as much of the United States braced for a Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. In Davos, Switzerland Davos Trump presented himself as a defender of jobs and growth against what he portrayed as alarmist scientists, even as Switzerland Davos Trump was photographed against a backdrop of snow and ice that his critics said he would later use as visual proof that the planet is not overheating, a juxtaposition captured in coverage of the Annual Meeting of. His choice of venue underscored how climate denial has become a recurring feature of his global brand, not just a domestic political talking point.
Scientists say the cold snap proves weather, not the end of warming
Climate researchers responded almost immediately, stressing that what people feel on a frigid morning is Local weather, not the global climate signal that unfolds over decades. More than a dozen Scientists interviewed on Friday told The Associated Press the president’s claims were wrong, explaining that they talk about “global” when it comes to warming because the United States is only a small slice of Earth and that even in a world that is heating overall, there will still be outbreaks of Arctic air and record snow in some regions, as detailed in analyses that emphasize how Local cold differs from longer term warming. Those experts pointed out that the United States is only 2% of Earth’s area and that west of the Rockies, temperatures have not been as extreme as in the Midwest and East, a reminder that cherry picking one region in one week tells people nothing about the planet as a whole, a point echoed in reporting that quotes Scientists who stress the global lens.
By SETH BORENSTEIN, an AP Science Writer, framed the contradiction starkly, noting that as much of the United States faces numbing cold, treacherous ice and heavy snow from an enormous storm, the world as a whole is still running a fever. He cited multiple lines of evidence that the planet has warmed at an increased rate in recent years, even as some places are “much colder in the past” than they are today, a nuance that undercuts Trump’s suggestion that a single cold outbreak means warming has stopped, as laid out in his Science Writer dispatch. More than a dozen scientists Friday told The Associated Press the president’s framing confuses short term, regional weather with long term, planetwide climate change, a distinction that They say is critical for voters to understand as policy fights over fossil fuels and emissions intensify, according to a detailed More focused fact check.
Record cold, long memories and what the data actually show
Trump has leaned heavily on the scale of the current outbreak, warning of a Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States and claiming he has “Rarely seen anything like it before,” as quoted in multiple accounts of his remarks that highlight how he uses the word Rarely to suggest unprecedented conditions. Scientists counter that it has been colder in the past, noting that while this storm is dangerous, average winter temperatures in many States are not as low as they were several decades ago, a point underscored in analyses that walk through those historical comparisons and emphasize THE FACTS behind the rhetoric, such as one that dissects the 40 state claim. Another review of the same TRUMP statement stresses that while the current Record Cold Wave is severe, long term records show that cold snaps used to be more frequent and more intense, meaning today’s extremes are occurring against a backdrop of overall warming, a nuance laid out in a separate breakdown of the Record Cold Wave rhetoric.
Scientists also remind people that climate change can actually make some winter extremes worse, not better. One CBS News explainer notes that a single Winter storm does not disprove climate change, despite Trump’s claim, and that Scientists have documented how a warming Arctic can disrupt the jet stream in ways that send frigid air plunging south more often, even as global averages rise, a dynamic unpacked in a detailed Winter analysis. Earlier fact checks of Trump’s comments about the “coldest weather in the history of the Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC” and one of the coldest Thanksgi holidays on record reached similar conclusions, pointing out that CLIMATE change allows for record cold spells even as the overall trend is upward, a pattern that has been documented repeatedly in assessments of CLIMATE myths.
From tweets to Truth Social, a familiar pattern of misrepresentation
Trump’s latest posts fit a pattern that dates back years, in which he seizes on cold snaps to cast doubt on warming and to belittle scientists. In a tweet on January 20, 2018, President Trump appeared to suggest that recent cold weather in the U.S. disproves the existence of global warming, a message that climate law experts later dissected as a misrepresentation of basic physics and of how greenhouse gases trap heat even when some regions experience bitter cold, as documented in a legal analysis of how President Trump misused science. That same logic has now migrated to Truth Social, where Trump’s 25 word post again asked “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???” and implied that if people are scraping ice off windshields, decades of research on rising seas and melting glaciers must be wrong, a framing that climate communicators say is both misleading and politically potent, as described in a breakdown of his Truth Social message.
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