7 ms·

U.S. had its coldest February in more than 30 years

41 points by finphil 6y ago

ubermonkey 6y ago
As a resident of Houston: Can confirm it sure FELT like it.
snarf21 6y ago
I have no proof, but as the climate has changed and mostly gotten warmer it seems like the summer heat takes longer and longer to dissipate from the ground and the water. We used to have snow at the end of November in PA. Now snow is only in January and February. It feels like winter is delayed a month because of our warmer summers. It also feels like spring is what keeps getting shorter. It warms slightly and then summer is full on again.
tonymet 6y ago
If we’re going to have headlines “hottest year on record “ to confirm global warming , then what would this coldest record indicate ? I don’t think either are good indicators , just curious why confirming evidence is welcome and detracting evidence is not .
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  IIUC but global warming is somewhat of a misnomer for local weather effects, which can include colder winters; i.e. global warming is thought to cause more extreme weather in general.
- briankelly 6y ago
  It indicates global warming as well. Colder weather is occurring below the Arctic because the polar air is getting pushed down (my laymen's understanding), and the Arctic winters are getting warmer and warmer as a trend.
- tyronehed 6y ago
  You clearly don't understand what is happening. The increase in CO2 causes wilder swings in weather, leading to more and more extremes. It also perturbed the Jet Stream, leading us to get in the USA what had been weather confined to the Arctic. This outcome is PRECISELY what had been predicted for the worst effects of climate change. In fact, the amount of CO2 that we have already released has triggered the knock-on effects, which is the melting of permafrost and the subsequent release of vast quantities of Methane gas, which is 84 times more damaging than CO2. Unfortunately, climate is not simple. By definition it is a complicated effect. But the coldest February ever seen is 100% in agreement with the predictions in Climate change.
  - rufus_foreman 6y ago
    So your claim is that the climate change predictions are that increased CO2 will cause an increase in extreme cold temperature events like we saw in the US recently. But extreme cold events like that have been decreasing over the years, not increasing. We have been experiencing fewer cold waves in the US. Given the predictions you described, does the fact of fewer cold waves make you doubt that climate change is happening?
- jcranmer 6y ago
  This is why a lot of scientists prefer the term "climate change" over "global warming"--the expected result isn't a uniform "everyone experiences warmer changes" but rather more severe disruptions in climate patterns. One of those predicted disruptions is a weakening of the margins of the polar vertex. This results in cases where the front of vertex pushes deeply far south. As a result, cold polar air can move deep into the US interior (so, say, 0°F or less in St. Louis) while Alaska is baking in 50-60°F. In other words, one of the predictions of global warming is that the US will see an increase in extreme cold events in winter even as the average Earth temperature is increasing.
- belorn 6y ago
  I would look towards the oceans if I wanted to see the effect of warming. From what I keep hearing, every year has a new "hottest year on record" for the average temperature measured by satellites.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    Not quite every year, since there is occasionally a year that is even hotter than the normal trend that doesn't get beat for a few years, e.g. 2016, but all of the past six years are in the top 6 hottest.
- gdavisson 6y ago
  It's not a matter of welcome vs unwelcome, it's a matter of global & persistent vs local and transient. Or, to put it another way, the larger your sample size, the better the signal-to-noise ratio is. So a single-month anomaly in one country isn't nearly as meaningful as a global anomaly over a whole year (which in turn is less meaningful than a global multi-year average). And this is just local & transient. There's a good article that discusses this (and related things) at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-things-people-get-wrong-about-the-polar-vortex-and-climate-change/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-t.... Take a look at the temperature anomaly map at the bottom; it shows a big colder-than-usual area over the central US, and another over Siberia. But it also shows warmer-than-usual areas in between them (around the North Pole), and another in Southern Asia. And it lists the "World" anomaly as 0.0 °C. So it's not that everything was colder, it was just that the cold was in different places than usual, and we happened to be one of the colder-than-usual places. But that map is just for February 19. When I look at the map for today (https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom), I see a cold area across part of Russia, and another around Alaska, but also warm bands across the Eastern US, Asia-Mideast-part-of-Africa, and parts of Antarctica. The World anomaly is listed as +0.4°C. Neither of these single-day maps tells you that much about what's going on in the longer term. Similarly, this anomalous cold month in the US was just February. According to the report: "Meteorological winter (December through February) was quite mild and dry across the contiguous U.S. The average temperature was 33.6 degrees F, 1.4 degrees above average, placing Winter 2021 in the warmest third of the winter record. Maine had its third-warmest winter; California had its 12th warmest." So while February was colder than usual here, December and January were warm enough to more than make up for it. But again, that's just three months in one country. If you look at the US report on all of 2020 (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202012 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202012), it was the fifth-warmest on record, and 1.33°C (2.4°F) above the 20th-century average. And globally (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202012 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202012), 2020 was the second-highest temperature on record, 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the 20th-century average. You can certainly find many days and months where it was unusually cold in a particular country or region, and many where it was much hotter than usual in a particular country or region. But that doesn't really mean much of anything; you really need to look at averages over larger areas and longer times.
baybal2 6y ago
A few years ago, I heard a hypothesis why hotter summers in the northern hemisphere can cause colder winters. I forgot where, or from whom I heard it, but here it is: Winters got more severe, and polar can vortex move further south because lands in the north became more dry, and there is less moisture both in the air, and soil.
hdkenhd 6y ago
Is climate change the most consequential effect of global warming? What does a 1C increase in temperature on a global / astronomical scale mean in terms of thermodynamics? How do we experience it at human scale? I have a basic undergraduate understanding of physics (at best), and it seems to me that the planet should be experiencing a significant increase in entropy - meaning that everything (i.e. reality itself) is becoming less predictable — at least in our tiny local neighborhood. Is this interpretation totally wrong?
- artonge 6y ago
  The temperature difference from the last ice age is only 5°C. Most of northern Europe was under a glacier all year long. Forecasts are telling us a 2°C increase before the end of the centuary is already inevitable. If we do not change anything, a 4°C increase is really probable. It is easy to imagine that a lot of place will become not be suitable to human life.
- gmuslera 6y ago
  Weather is so complex that a nearly chaotic system, the butterfly effect comes from the idea that the flapping of a butterfly in south africa could be the thing that start a tropical storm in the caribbean a couple of weeks later. It is so complex because the amount of things that play a role there. Some of the components you have are i.e. sea currents (like the Gulf Stream, making England warmer than it should be) or the polar vortex, a more or less stable cyclone that runs in the upper atmosphere. Global warming affect those components, and in particular was the polar vortex what caused the cold weather in the US the last months. But when you talk about climate in the context of global warming, you are talking about yearly global temperature averages, not what happen in only one region or in a few days/months.
- fiftyfifty 6y ago
  I think an increase in entropy is a great way to put it. More energy from the sun is being kept in the atmosphere (and the oceans), more energy is going to effect a complex system like the Earth's atmosphere in complex ways. More energy means changes in air currents and ocean currents that could have a significant impact on local weather patterns. More energy means larger more powerful storms. More energy means more moisture in the atmosphere which means potentially more rainfall/snowfall in some areas.
ronnier 6y ago
The colder temps worked out for me. AT&T has a research business center next to my home and when the temperature is above 45 degrees they turn on a chiller unit to keep their servers cool. It blasts over 45 DB (I sometimes go over 50 decibels) into my house all night as long as long as the temperature is over 45 degrees. With the colder temps outside, I've been able to sleep in my room. When the warmer weather hits I'm not able to sleep in my own room at night. My entire house is filled with an extremely torturous tone that will drive you insane. ATT won't do anything about it even though licensed professionals show they are above the city code allowed noise levels at night.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  Maybe you should fight it with a lawsuit?
  - ronnier 6y ago
    That's the plan. Waiting on the official report next week and will present it to the city (again). If the city continues to refuse to take action then I'll have to move forward with a lawsuit.
- wahern 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, did the research center exist before the home was built or vice-versa? The research center existing first doesn't normally preclude a nuisance claim. But land use legal scholars always like to point out that people tend to move to the nuisance, mostly because such residential developments tend to be cheaper. Sprawl tends to envelop industrial areas over time. I'm just curious as a point of reference. No judgment. Heck, most American cities try too hard to separate land uses, which exacerbates sprawl. Rather than pretending we can always avoid conflicting uses through geographic dispersion, we should probably put in more effort to streamlining resolution of particular cases.
  - ronnier 6y ago
    It existed before I bought the house, but I bought the house during the cool weather so I had no idea this chiller would be on at night. I didn't hear the chiller when I bought the house. I heard the normal hvac units outside but you can't hear them inside. It wasn't until after I moved in and later that the chiller started firing at night while I was in my be trying to sleep.
injb 6y ago
Strangely, it has been a very mild winter for the upper Midwest
- tyronehed 6y ago
  That's because the Jet Stream has moved South. The Arctic was much warmer, leading to melting of permafrost and the firing of the so-called methane clathrate gun, which releases vast amounts of tremendously-damaging methane gas.
- jpindar 6y ago
  Same in New England. There were a few days of below average temperatures, but mostly it's been mild and we've had hardly any snow.
macrowhat 6y ago
This is why I'm so skeptical of climate alarmists. It wasn't that long ago the alarmism was centered around a "big freeze" (http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19731203,00.html http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19731203,00.html). I see it as a feeble attempt to acquire power and funnel money from hard-working citizens to the "scientific" community, without providing any tangible benefits. What do you guys think?
- zozin 6y ago
  I sometimes joke that climate change orthodoxy is driven in part by the CIA in order to retard growth/industrialization in semi and non-developed countries in order to elongate America's hold on power. I would describe myself as agnostic on the topic simply because I haven't done enough personal research, but the devout belief that many people have in human-caused global climate change is really off putting, primarily because it's hubristic in so many ways: that our presence and actions are harming a 4.5 billion year planet in the span of a few decades; that our models are that good; that our data is that good; that our analysis and conclusions are undoubtedly true, etc. My inner skeptic just freaks out.
  - macrowhat 6y ago
    That mostly mirrors my sentiment, although I'd say that the government is inhibiting industrial growth foremost in the US, unfortunately without regard for the American workers that it hurts. Then for some strange reason, the same people who criticize industrial pollutants here turn around and revere China's industrial growth, all the while promoting "cheap goods" without taking responsibility for the pollution their goods cause there. Glaring hypocrisy.
  - dwaltrip 6y ago
    We aren’t harming the planet. We are making it harder for ourselves to live comfortably on the planet. If city lights can light up the Earth at night as seen from space, is it really such a huge stretch to think that industrial activity across the globe can alter the composition of the atmosphere in a significant way?
  - 6y ago
aksss 6y ago
I dislike these headlines techniques a lot, and they are very frequent - like the coldest March 1st in 23 years, or the warmest Jan 8th in 12.5 years, etc. The warmest Feb. in 30+ years (though not, evidently, in 40+ years). We don't see headlines passed around when the day doesn't break any records, and the bar is raised or lowered seemingly to fit the need for a record. Take any day, and find the last time the temp was colder or warmer, set the headline to those parameters and gen up some more anxiety. I'm skeptical of how useful headlines like this are for any purpose, and suspect they do more harm than good in terms of giving people a tin ear to any real problem.
- genericone 6y ago
  Its sports statistics, but climate statistics. People care enough to think perhaps the statistic has meaning, but its just another user engagement strategy. "The coldest 2nd tuesday of a leap year March on record in the last 100 years."
  - aksss 6y ago
    That’s a very apt analogy - any football game will have the same stuff: “he just set the record for the most yards run in a third quarter during a second playoff game that happened on a Tuesday, in the history of the NFL.”
- T-hawk 6y ago
  This is known as the multiple-endpoints fallacy, where you deliberately pick the outlying data point after the fact and ignore all the mundane ones. Another example is when you see reports of some county experiencing a once-in-500-year flood, trying to establish the shock value of how unusual and terrible a catastrophe that is. But if you're observing 500 such counties, then every year that will happen to some one of them. You just never notice the 499 data points where it didn't.
yread 6y ago
Meanwhile in Europe it was slightly above average and globally it was also above average: https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-february-2021 https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-februa... with some all time high record days https://earther.gizmodo.com/unseasonable-european-warmth-smashes-all-time-february-1846357348 https://earther.gizmodo.com/unseasonable-european-warmth-sma... also see this surprisingly informative and balanced article about the causes https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/23/climate-change-are-europe-s-winter-weather-extremes-linked-to-global-warming https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/23/climate-change-are-europ...
rektide 6y ago
I keep thinking- that's the arctic, leaving. :(

41 points by finphil 6y ago

As a resident of Houston: Can confirm it sure FELT like it.

I have no proof, but as the climate has changed and mostly gotten warmer it seems like the summer heat takes longer and longer to dissipate from the ground and the water. We used to have snow at the end of November in PA. Now snow is only in January and February. It feels like winter is delayed a month because of our warmer summers. It also feels like spring is what keeps getting shorter. It warms slightly and then summer is full on again.

tonymet 6y ago

If we’re going to have headlines “hottest year on record “ to confirm global warming , then what would this coldest record indicate ? I don’t think either are good indicators , just curious why confirming evidence is welcome and detracting evidence is not .

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
IIUC but global warming is somewhat of a misnomer for local weather effects, which can include colder winters; i.e. global warming is thought to cause more extreme weather in general.
briankelly 6y ago
It indicates global warming as well. Colder weather is occurring below the Arctic because the polar air is getting pushed down (my laymen's understanding), and the Arctic winters are getting warmer and warmer as a trend.
tyronehed 6y ago
You clearly don't understand what is happening. The increase in CO2 causes wilder swings in weather, leading to more and more extremes. It also perturbed the Jet Stream, leading us to get in the USA what had been weather confined to the Arctic. This outcome is PRECISELY what had been predicted for the worst effects of climate change. In fact, the amount of CO2 that we have already released has triggered the knock-on effects, which is the melting of permafrost and the subsequent release of vast quantities of Methane gas, which is 84 times more damaging than CO2. Unfortunately, climate is not simple. By definition it is a complicated effect. But the coldest February ever seen is 100% in agreement with the predictions in Climate change.
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  So your claim is that the climate change predictions are that increased CO2 will cause an increase in extreme cold temperature events like we saw in the US recently. But extreme cold events like that have been decreasing over the years, not increasing. We have been experiencing fewer cold waves in the US. Given the predictions you described, does the fact of fewer cold waves make you doubt that climate change is happening?
jcranmer 6y ago
This is why a lot of scientists prefer the term "climate change" over "global warming"--the expected result isn't a uniform "everyone experiences warmer changes" but rather more severe disruptions in climate patterns. One of those predicted disruptions is a weakening of the margins of the polar vertex. This results in cases where the front of vertex pushes deeply far south. As a result, cold polar air can move deep into the US interior (so, say, 0°F or less in St. Louis) while Alaska is baking in 50-60°F. In other words, one of the predictions of global warming is that the US will see an increase in extreme cold events in winter even as the average Earth temperature is increasing.
belorn 6y ago
I would look towards the oceans if I wanted to see the effect of warming. From what I keep hearing, every year has a new "hottest year on record" for the average temperature measured by satellites.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Not quite every year, since there is occasionally a year that is even hotter than the normal trend that doesn't get beat for a few years, e.g. 2016, but all of the past six years are in the top 6 hottest.
gdavisson 6y ago
It's not a matter of welcome vs unwelcome, it's a matter of global & persistent vs local and transient. Or, to put it another way, the larger your sample size, the better the signal-to-noise ratio is. So a single-month anomaly in one country isn't nearly as meaningful as a global anomaly over a whole year (which in turn is less meaningful than a global multi-year average). And this is just local & transient. There's a good article that discusses this (and related things) at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-things-people-get-wrong-about-the-polar-vortex-and-climate-change/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-t.... Take a look at the temperature anomaly map at the bottom; it shows a big colder-than-usual area over the central US, and another over Siberia. But it also shows warmer-than-usual areas in between them (around the North Pole), and another in Southern Asia. And it lists the "World" anomaly as 0.0 °C. So it's not that everything was colder, it was just that the cold was in different places than usual, and we happened to be one of the colder-than-usual places. But that map is just for February 19. When I look at the map for today (https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom), I see a cold area across part of Russia, and another around Alaska, but also warm bands across the Eastern US, Asia-Mideast-part-of-Africa, and parts of Antarctica. The World anomaly is listed as +0.4°C. Neither of these single-day maps tells you that much about what's going on in the longer term. Similarly, this anomalous cold month in the US was just February. According to the report: "Meteorological winter (December through February) was quite mild and dry across the contiguous U.S. The average temperature was 33.6 degrees F, 1.4 degrees above average, placing Winter 2021 in the warmest third of the winter record. Maine had its third-warmest winter; California had its 12th warmest." So while February was colder than usual here, December and January were warm enough to more than make up for it. But again, that's just three months in one country. If you look at the US report on all of 2020 (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202012 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202012), it was the fifth-warmest on record, and 1.33°C (2.4°F) above the 20th-century average. And globally (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202012 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202012), 2020 was the second-highest temperature on record, 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the 20th-century average. You can certainly find many days and months where it was unusually cold in a particular country or region, and many where it was much hotter than usual in a particular country or region. But that doesn't really mean much of anything; you really need to look at averages over larger areas and longer times.

baybal2 6y ago

A few years ago, I heard a hypothesis why hotter summers in the northern hemisphere can cause colder winters. I forgot where, or from whom I heard it, but here it is: Winters got more severe, and polar can vortex move further south because lands in the north became more dry, and there is less moisture both in the air, and soil.

hdkenhd 6y ago

Is climate change the most consequential effect of global warming? What does a 1C increase in temperature on a global / astronomical scale mean in terms of thermodynamics? How do we experience it at human scale? I have a basic undergraduate understanding of physics (at best), and it seems to me that the planet should be experiencing a significant increase in entropy - meaning that everything (i.e. reality itself) is becoming less predictable — at least in our tiny local neighborhood. Is this interpretation totally wrong?

artonge 6y ago
The temperature difference from the last ice age is only 5°C. Most of northern Europe was under a glacier all year long. Forecasts are telling us a 2°C increase before the end of the centuary is already inevitable. If we do not change anything, a 4°C increase is really probable. It is easy to imagine that a lot of place will become not be suitable to human life.
gmuslera 6y ago
Weather is so complex that a nearly chaotic system, the butterfly effect comes from the idea that the flapping of a butterfly in south africa could be the thing that start a tropical storm in the caribbean a couple of weeks later. It is so complex because the amount of things that play a role there. Some of the components you have are i.e. sea currents (like the Gulf Stream, making England warmer than it should be) or the polar vortex, a more or less stable cyclone that runs in the upper atmosphere. Global warming affect those components, and in particular was the polar vortex what caused the cold weather in the US the last months. But when you talk about climate in the context of global warming, you are talking about yearly global temperature averages, not what happen in only one region or in a few days/months.
fiftyfifty 6y ago
I think an increase in entropy is a great way to put it. More energy from the sun is being kept in the atmosphere (and the oceans), more energy is going to effect a complex system like the Earth's atmosphere in complex ways. More energy means changes in air currents and ocean currents that could have a significant impact on local weather patterns. More energy means larger more powerful storms. More energy means more moisture in the atmosphere which means potentially more rainfall/snowfall in some areas.

ronnier 6y ago

The colder temps worked out for me. AT&T has a research business center next to my home and when the temperature is above 45 degrees they turn on a chiller unit to keep their servers cool. It blasts over 45 DB (I sometimes go over 50 decibels) into my house all night as long as long as the temperature is over 45 degrees. With the colder temps outside, I've been able to sleep in my room. When the warmer weather hits I'm not able to sleep in my own room at night. My entire house is filled with an extremely torturous tone that will drive you insane. ATT won't do anything about it even though licensed professionals show they are above the city code allowed noise levels at night.

theandrewbailey 6y ago
Maybe you should fight it with a lawsuit?
- ronnier 6y ago
  That's the plan. Waiting on the official report next week and will present it to the city (again). If the city continues to refuse to take action then I'll have to move forward with a lawsuit.
wahern 6y ago
Out of curiosity, did the research center exist before the home was built or vice-versa? The research center existing first doesn't normally preclude a nuisance claim. But land use legal scholars always like to point out that people tend to move to the nuisance, mostly because such residential developments tend to be cheaper. Sprawl tends to envelop industrial areas over time. I'm just curious as a point of reference. No judgment. Heck, most American cities try too hard to separate land uses, which exacerbates sprawl. Rather than pretending we can always avoid conflicting uses through geographic dispersion, we should probably put in more effort to streamlining resolution of particular cases.
- ronnier 6y ago
  It existed before I bought the house, but I bought the house during the cool weather so I had no idea this chiller would be on at night. I didn't hear the chiller when I bought the house. I heard the normal hvac units outside but you can't hear them inside. It wasn't until after I moved in and later that the chiller started firing at night while I was in my be trying to sleep.

injb 6y ago

Strangely, it has been a very mild winter for the upper Midwest

tyronehed 6y ago
That's because the Jet Stream has moved South. The Arctic was much warmer, leading to melting of permafrost and the firing of the so-called methane clathrate gun, which releases vast amounts of tremendously-damaging methane gas.
jpindar 6y ago
Same in New England. There were a few days of below average temperatures, but mostly it's been mild and we've had hardly any snow.

macrowhat 6y ago

This is why I'm so skeptical of climate alarmists. It wasn't that long ago the alarmism was centered around a "big freeze" (http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19731203,00.html http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19731203,00.html). I see it as a feeble attempt to acquire power and funnel money from hard-working citizens to the "scientific" community, without providing any tangible benefits. What do you guys think?

zozin 6y ago
I sometimes joke that climate change orthodoxy is driven in part by the CIA in order to retard growth/industrialization in semi and non-developed countries in order to elongate America's hold on power. I would describe myself as agnostic on the topic simply because I haven't done enough personal research, but the devout belief that many people have in human-caused global climate change is really off putting, primarily because it's hubristic in so many ways: that our presence and actions are harming a 4.5 billion year planet in the span of a few decades; that our models are that good; that our data is that good; that our analysis and conclusions are undoubtedly true, etc. My inner skeptic just freaks out.
- macrowhat 6y ago
  That mostly mirrors my sentiment, although I'd say that the government is inhibiting industrial growth foremost in the US, unfortunately without regard for the American workers that it hurts. Then for some strange reason, the same people who criticize industrial pollutants here turn around and revere China's industrial growth, all the while promoting "cheap goods" without taking responsibility for the pollution their goods cause there. Glaring hypocrisy.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  We aren’t harming the planet. We are making it harder for ourselves to live comfortably on the planet. If city lights can light up the Earth at night as seen from space, is it really such a huge stretch to think that industrial activity across the globe can alter the composition of the atmosphere in a significant way?
- 6y ago

aksss 6y ago

I dislike these headlines techniques a lot, and they are very frequent - like the coldest March 1st in 23 years, or the warmest Jan 8th in 12.5 years, etc. The warmest Feb. in 30+ years (though not, evidently, in 40+ years). We don't see headlines passed around when the day doesn't break any records, and the bar is raised or lowered seemingly to fit the need for a record. Take any day, and find the last time the temp was colder or warmer, set the headline to those parameters and gen up some more anxiety. I'm skeptical of how useful headlines like this are for any purpose, and suspect they do more harm than good in terms of giving people a tin ear to any real problem.

genericone 6y ago
Its sports statistics, but climate statistics. People care enough to think perhaps the statistic has meaning, but its just another user engagement strategy. "The coldest 2nd tuesday of a leap year March on record in the last 100 years."
- aksss 6y ago
  That’s a very apt analogy - any football game will have the same stuff: “he just set the record for the most yards run in a third quarter during a second playoff game that happened on a Tuesday, in the history of the NFL.”
T-hawk 6y ago
This is known as the multiple-endpoints fallacy, where you deliberately pick the outlying data point after the fact and ignore all the mundane ones. Another example is when you see reports of some county experiencing a once-in-500-year flood, trying to establish the shock value of how unusual and terrible a catastrophe that is. But if you're observing 500 such counties, then every year that will happen to some one of them. You just never notice the 499 data points where it didn't.

yread 6y ago

Meanwhile in Europe it was slightly above average and globally it was also above average: https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-february-2021 https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-februa... with some all time high record days https://earther.gizmodo.com/unseasonable-european-warmth-smashes-all-time-february-1846357348 https://earther.gizmodo.com/unseasonable-european-warmth-sma... also see this surprisingly informative and balanced article about the causes https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/23/climate-change-are-europe-s-winter-weather-extremes-linked-to-global-warming https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/23/climate-change-are-europ...

rektide 6y ago

I keep thinking- that's the arctic, leaving. :(