How Do Climate Change Alarmists Deal with Constant Freezing Cold Winters? By James Reed and Brian Simpson

Summer has ended and now we are heading to freezing cold Melbourne winters, but mild by say northern parts of America, such as Alaska, so be grateful for small mercies my mother always said. At least our cars do not get embedded in huge blocks of ice! But this raises a good question, discussed by Brian Joondeph, in what world does cold winters mean global warming, as the climate change fanatics tell us?

His article "Cold Winters Mean Global Warming? In What World?"

challenges the narrative that cold winters are consistent with global warming or climate change. It begins with a cultural reference to the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside," juxtaposing its historical context with modern sensitivities, before pivoting to weather data. Joondeph cites meteorologists Kevin Williams and Joe Bastardi, who note that January 2025 was exceptionally cold in the U.S., with average temperatures 3.6°F below normal—the coldest since 1994—and maximum temperatures the lowest since 1988. He argues that such cold snaps contradict the idea of a warming planet, suggesting that the shift from "global warming" to "climate change" is a rhetorical manoeuvre to accommodate inconvenient weather patterns.

The piece critiques mainstream media and scientific claims, such as the BBC's assertion that Arctic warming causes colder winters, calling it a convenient catch-all explanation. Joondeph highlights perceived inconsistencies in PBS reporting—lamenting warmer winters one year and noting record cold the next—implying a lack of coherence in climate narratives. He references historical predictions, like a 1970s ice age scare and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 2019 claim of a 12-year deadline to avert catastrophe, to argue that climate alarmism is often exaggerated or wrong. Public opinion data from Rasmussen and Pew is cited to suggest that Americans are buying into climate change despite these contradictions, which he frames as a rejection of common sense.

Joondeph concludes by questioning the cost and efficacy of climate policies, suggesting they impose heavy economic burdens (e.g., billions in regulations) while failing to address more pressing threats like government mismanagement.

The article's core observation—that record-cold winters persist despite decades of warming predictions—casts doubt on the straightforward narrative of a uniformly heating planet. If global warming were as dominant as claimed, extreme cold events should be diminishing, not setting records (e.g., January 2025's -20.1°C anomaly). This suggests either the warming trend is overstated or natural variability overshadows human influence, challenging the urgency of climate changeism.

Joondeph's examples of past doomsday forecasts—1970s ice age warnings, Ehrlich's famine predictions, Ocasio-Cortez's 12-year deadline—highlight a pattern of alarmist errors. These misses erode trust in current climate models, which often extrapolate dire outcomes from limited data. If experts were wrong before, why assume infallibility now? This supports a case against overreacting to climate changeism's calls for radical policy shifts.

The rebranding from "global warming" to "climate change" can be seen as an admission that the original hypothesis doesn't fully hold. Cold winters, droughts, floods—all are now attributed to "climate change," making the term unfalsifiable. A theory that explains everything explains nothing, undermining the scientific rigour climate changeism claims. This linguistic flexibility suggests a narrative driven more by ideology than evidence.

Earth's climate has fluctuated dramatically without human input—ice ages, warm periods like the Medieval Warm Period—over millennia. Joondeph implies that current cold snaps could reflect similar natural cycles, not CO₂-driven anomalies. Studies like those in Science (e.g., Judd et al., 2024); Judd, E. J., Tierney, J. E., Lunt, D. J., Valdes, P. J., Huber, M., Wing, S. L., ... & Zachos, J. C. (2024), "A 485-million-year history of Earth's surface temperature." Science, 385(6715), 1328–1334. DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3705, show temperatures today are low compared to 485 million years of history, with CO₂ levels near plant-survival thresholds. This long view weakens climate changeism's focus on recent decades as uniquely catastrophic.

We therefore agree with Joondeph's view that cold winters expose flaws in climate changeism. It posits that natural variability, historical inaccuracies, and economic impracticality outweigh the case for human-driven warming as a crisis. Rather than a planet on the brink, we may face a climate that's stubbornly normal—cold, hot, and everything in between—rendering climate changeism's apocalyptic fervor unnecessary and overblown.

Why abandon our industrial society for a mess of pottage: Genesis 25:29-34?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/cold_winters_mean_global_warming_in_what_world.html

"Baby, It's Cold Outside is a popular Christmas song from another era, long before the MeToo virus infected society. The virus turned harmless flirting into a crime against humanity, disqualifying perpetrators from employment, government service, or polite society.

Today, we sing, ma'am, sir, they, or ze, it's cold outside.

How cold? "With an average temperature running 3.6 degrees below normal, this is currently the coldest January nationally (lower 48) since 1994", says Kevin Williams, meteorologist and President of Weather-Track, Inc.

Another meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, agrees. "The nation for Jan is now the coldest max temps since 1988 at - 4.2."

Logic suggests that cold winters, especially record-setting ones, mean that the planet may not be warming, as global warming alarmists insist.

In response, these Chicken Littles merely changed the name from "global warming" to "climate change" to mask the obvious contradiction of a warming planet causing colder winters.

This is similar to how illegal aliens became illegal migrants, then undocumented individuals, and finally just immigrants or visitors, making no distinction between law-abiding and border-crashing "visitors" to America.

Corporate media overlooks the irony in these contradictions. From the BBC: "Climate change: Arctic warming linked to colder winters." How convenient. Anything happening in the Arctic, whether warming, cooling, or raining cats and dogs, can be "linked" to climate change.

Last winter, PBS asked, "Already missing winter? Here's what we lose when the season warms up." Less than a year later, PBS noted the opposite, "Weekend of Arctic storms could break low-temperature records in U.S. heartland."

No wonder President Trump is threatening to defund PBS and NPR. They are not practicing journalism but instead propaganda, magical thinking, or both.

What about the myriad failed predictions?

In 1970, the Boston Globe wrote, "Scientists predict a new ice age by the 21st century." Well, here we are, and Chicago isn't buried under a mile of ice as it was in the last ice age.

In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned, "The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change." We are almost halfway to 2031, and the world is alive and well. Government incompetence and malfeasance threaten the world more than cold winters in Alabama and Mississippi.

In 1967, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich said, "The time of famines is upon us" and will be most disastrous by 1975. Instead of starving Americans, we have an epidemic of obesity.

Predictions are like a$holes; everyone has one. Betting on who will win the Super Bowl or guessing the winning lottery number involves one's own money and does not hurt anyone else.

But these climate prognostications are costly, involving laws, rules, regulations, taxes, and prosecutions, which cost billions of dollars that could be better spent elsewhere.

These hair-on-fire screeds about climate change have consequences. Are we cooling or warming? Deaths from cold are ten times more common than deaths from heat. Recent news bears this out, "At least 11 dead after record-breaking snowstorm swept across the South."

So here we are, with confident assertions that global warming—now climate change—is the world's biggest problem. Former President Joe Biden claimed, "Climate change is an existential threat to humanity."

Do the American people agree? One would think not, as there is growing skepticism over the "follow the science" diktats from government health and science agencies. Most of the COVID "science" was manufactured or based on political, not medical, science.

Rasmussen Reports, however, threw water on the idea that Americans were waking up and reintroduced to common sense. What used to be called "global warming" has been renamed climate change, and nearly two-thirds of Americans suspect it's making winter worse. Sixty-four percent (64%) believe it's likely that climate change is causing more extreme weather, including severe snow storms in winter, including 41% who think it's very likely.

Not only is the Rasmussen Reports sample embracing climate change, but Pew Research has also found similar results. A majority of Americans support prioritizing the development of renewable energy sources. Americans are reluctant to phase out fossil fuels altogether, but younger adults are more open to it. The public supports the federal government incentivizing wind and solar energy production.

Prioritizing over what? Federal funding is a zero-sum game, meaning that if they fund something more, something else will be funded less. Should it be entitlement services? Defense? Border security? It's all tradeoffs, and Americans should decide and vote accordingly.

Young Americans are not driving. USA Today reported that "Gen Z is less likely to have a driver's license." Phasing out fossil fuels won't phase them, as they are little concerned about where their Uber car gets its gas or where their Lyft EV gets its electricity.

Incentives are fine up to a point, but they should be focused on emerging technologies. Wind and solar energy are well-established technologies that shouldn't be subsidized. If they are as beneficial as the government claims, they should sell themselves and not need taxpayer subsidies.

As the Mercatus Center of George Mason University pointed out, "When the government subsidizes businesses, it weakens profit-and-loss signals in the economy and undermines market-based entrepreneurship."

Wind and solar energy are fine but an honest analysis of the environmental impact of building, maintaining, and disposal of wind turbines and solar panels is warranted.

And what happens when the wind doesn't blow? As the UK Telegraph reported, "Wind power has collapsed to less than 1pc of Britain's electricity supply." Why? The wind stopped blowing. Advanced societies cannot function with a fickle and unreliable energy supply.

The larger problem is that Rasmussen Reports found that almost two-thirds of American adults believe climate change is causing more extreme weather. This ignores the fact that extreme weather today receives far more coverage on legacy and new media, including social media, where there are endless videos of every snowstorm or hurricane, compared to a few decades ago when news came from the three major networks and local print newspapers.

Many may not realize that history did not begin when they were born, a very short timeframe for assessing weather trends.

It's evident that many Americans still buy into the climate doomsday prophecies. Hopefully, President Trump and his new team can guide the climate narrative toward one of common sense and reason when taking a break from dismantling the national and international deep states."