This morning, we woke up to a solid coating of ice and snow here in Spartanburg, SC. The kids are ecstatic, and we have a rare Sunday morning without attending worship at our church. “Snow Days” here in the Southeast USA are one of those rare treats that not only drive people to the grocery store for bread and milk but also remind us of the simple joys of meteorology, family, and bundling up to go make snowpeople and snowsquirrels.
President Trump recently posted a familiar taunt about this “record cold wave” hitting roughly 40 states, then demanded to know: “Whatever happened to global warming?” The line is designed to feel like common sense. It also relies on a category mistake so basic that it functions less as an argument and more as a test of whether we can still distinguish weather from climate.
Let me start with the obvious and non-negotiable point. A cold wave is weather. Global warming is climate. Weather is what your body meets when you step outside today. Climate is the long story of patterns, averages, extremes, and probabilities over decades. Confusing the two is like arguing that because one person had a bad afternoon, the whole biography is a lie.
And this matters right now because the cold is not theoretical. This weekend’s storm system has been described as sprawling and dangerous, with snow, ice, outages, and widespread travel disruption across large portions of the country. People and more-than-humans die in cold snaps. Communities can be immobilized. Grids and water systems can fail. None of that is diminished by insisting, clearly and calmly, that a warming planet does not mean the end of winter.
Why a warming world can still deliver severe cold
Here’s the part that seems to surprise people every year… global warming loads the dice, but it doesn’t remove variability. We are adding heat to the Earth system overall, especially into the oceans, and that shift changes the background conditions in which weather plays out. NASA puts it plainly in materials aimed at non-specialists… a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can contribute to heavier snowfall when temperatures are still cold enough for snow.
Then there’s the polar vortex, which is not a new invention but a real atmospheric feature that can, under certain configurations, stretch or wobble in ways that allow Arctic air to plunge south. NOAA’s explainer is useful here because it describes the mechanism without turning it into political theater.
The more contested question is whether, and how, Arctic warming may be influencing the likelihood of certain jet stream patterns or polar vortex “stretching” events. NOAA has highlighted research suggesting Arctic change can be associated with events that deliver extreme cold into the U.S., while also acknowledging this is an active research area with complexity and ongoing refinement. If you want a careful summary of the “some evidence, not settled, still being worked” reality, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has a sober discussion of how scientific findings have differed across studies and models.
So yes… a frigid outbreak can happen in a warming world. In some cases, warming can even intensify the water cycle and shape storm dynamics in ways that worsen impacts, including snow and ice hazards, depending on the temperature profile of the air mass involved.
What the best synthesis says about cold extremes
If we zoom out to the scale climate science is actually talking about, the headline is straightforward: as the planet warms, cold extremes generally become less frequent and less severe, even though they do not disappear. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report explicitly treats this, including regionally, noting projected decreases in cold spells over North America under continued warming.
This is the mature way to hold the reality. Not “winter is canceled,” and not “it’s cold today so a warming planet is fake,” but rather: the distribution is shifting. The tails move. The overlaps remain, and the costs of getting this wrong are paid by real bodies in real places… especially the elderly, the poor, the unhoused, and anyone living in fragile infrastructure conditions.
The deeper problem with the President’s rhetoric
The rhetorical move in Trump’s post is not curiosity. It is contempt for scale. It treats the climate crisis as a punchline and the public as if we cannot learn the difference between an experience and an explanation.
And that contempt has consequences. When leaders encourage people to dismiss climate reality as ideology, they create the conditions for underinvestment in preparedness and resilience in weatherization, grid hardening, public health capacity, and the kind of local mutual aid that becomes lifesaving when the lights go out and roads glaze over.
This is where I want to bring in a conviction that has been forming in my own work, what I’ve called ecological intentionality. The question is not whether we can win a snarky argument on social media. The question is whether we can train our attention on what is actually happening in the atmosphere, the oceans, our towns, and the lives most exposed to harm.
A cold wave is not evidence against climate change. It is evidence that our moral and infrastructural responsibilities do not pause for talking points. The atmosphere does not care about our slogans. The grid does not care about our sarcasm. The vulnerable neighbor down the street certainly does not.
So if we want a real question to ask in the wake of this storm, it might be something like:
If extremes are becoming more disruptive and more expensive, why are we still treating climate risk, energy resilience, and public safety as partisan props instead of basic obligations of governance and community?
Back to the tree line
In my backyard, the black walnut does not “debate” the cold. It receives it. It holds it. It keeps faith with time. That is not passivity but discipline and a kind of creaturely realism. It reminds me that perception comes first. Not as an excuse to avoid ethics, but as the condition for any ethics that might actually be honest.
We can do the same. We can tell the truth about the weather and climate at once. We can care for people in the cold without surrendering our minds to the cheap thrill of false equivalence. And we can choose, even now, to become the kind of communities that prepare, adapt, and protect because reality is not an opponent to be dunked on. It is a world to be inhabited responsibly.