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,

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.