The brutal Arctic freeze in the US has caught worldwide attention, with the lowest temperature plunging to a mind-boggling -49C (-56F) in Cotton, Minnesota. As Donald Trump tweeted: “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”, but then he has posted similar tweets over the past two years.
The US president had conveniently overlooked unseasonably high temperatures over Alaska, as well as much of the Arctic. He also seemed unaware of the southern hemisphere where there have been brutal heatwaves in Australia, New Zealand and Chile, and abnormally high temperatures over much of Antarctica. In fact, on 29 January, the average temperature for the entire world was 0.3C above normal.
Trump had also fallen into the trap of confusing weather and climate. Weather is what happens in the short term, climate is over the longer term. It can be bitterly cold outside, but the global climate is warming – the world’s 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, and the top four warmest years were over 2015-18. The big freeze in North America has caught the headlines, but the big picture is the continuing rise of the world’s temperatures.
