I live in Concord, MA. My wife and I planned to go out for brunch on Sunday. We drove about 10 yards down a snowy and slippery road and let discretion be the better part of valor and, very carefully, and returned home. We enjoyed watching the snow fall outside our Fox Run Farm house in the country during the New England Patriots vs. the Denver Broncos football game (the Patriots won!) and sympathized with the players as they were pelted with snow in the fourth quarter. But we are New Englanders who haven’t had much snow for a while and are delighted to get a really big one. More on how much in a sec.
A Substantial Storm
We have a long driveway that goes to our barn, and our plow guys do a great job, including the walk leading up to our house. But much manual shoveling for me remained to be done yesterday morning. Drifts of snow three feet high were piled in front of our chicken coop and all the way down to the back of the barn where my weight lifting gym is.
As I was moving a lot of thankfully light and fluffy snow, I started thinking about President Trump’s comment on Truth Social — “Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???” — in response to a major storm forecast across much of the U.S. In parts of the South not accustomed to heavy winter weather. For example, Winter Storm Fern still delivered measurable snow — about 3.6 inches in Memphis, 6.7 inches in Little Rock, 8.5 inches around Oklahoma City, and over 2 inches near Dallas–Fort Worth — while freezing rain and ice coated broad swaths of northern Mississippi and Alabama.
In response to the storm’s widespread impacts for millions of Americans, President Donald Trump approved emergency disaster declarations for at least a dozen states, unlocking federal assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help with response and recovery efforts across the hardest-hit regions. Trump said the federal government was working closely with FEMA, state governors, and emergency management teams to ensure communities had resources and support during the ongoing severe winter weather.
The President is not a climate scientist. Nor am I—and that applies to nearly everyone else in the world. Setting his purposefully provocative language aside, Mr. Trump has raised a fair question. How can we be getting such a big snowstorm across a broad swath of America, including in states not accustomed to snow and ice, in the context of global warming? This is the issue I want to address here.
The storm that swept across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast over the weekend deposited anywhere from 12 to 30 inches of snow across a wide swath of states. Here in Concord, we got about 18 inches. Parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York saw significantly more. The National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings affecting tens of millions of people. Roads were closed, flights were canceled, and governors declared states of emergency. It was, by any measure, a significant winter weather event—the kind that makes national news and prompts legitimate questions.
For many Americans watching this unfold, the question is obvious. If the planet is warming, why are we getting hammered by major snowstorms? It’s a fair question, and the confusion is understandable. The short answer is that climate change doesn’t eliminate winter or snow. What it does is make weather systems more unstable and, when events occur, more extreme.
Weather Is Not Climate
The first clarification worth making is the distinction between weather and climate. Weather is what happens on any given day or week. Climate describes long-term patterns of temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric conditions measured over decades. A single snowstorm, no matter how large, tells us nothing definitive about whether the climate is changing—just as a hot summer day doesn’t prove that it is.
This distinction matters because it is easy to cherry-pick individual events to support almost any narrative. A blizzard in January doesn’t disprove global warming any more than an unusually warm December day proves it. What matters is the accumulated evidence—rising global average temperatures, warming oceans, melting ice sheets, and shifting seasonal patterns measured consistently over time. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global average temperatures are approaching the 1.5°C (about 2.7°F) threshold that scientists have long used to signal rising climate risks, even though impacts increase along a continuum rather than at a single breaking point (IPCC).
Extreme Weather, Not Just Warmer Weather
Here is where the public conversation often goes astray. Many people hear “global warming” and assume it means everything simply gets steadily warmer and milder. But that is not how complex climate systems behave. A more accurate way to think about climate change is that it destabilizes weather patterns and amplifies extremes. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture. That means storms—when they form—have more fuel and can produce heavier precipitation, whether that falls as rain or snow. The IPCC has documented this relationship clearly, showing that warming increases the intensity of heavy precipitation events, including extreme snowfall when temperatures remain near freezing.
We are seeing this across the system. Hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly as warmer oceans provide additional energy, increasing the likelihood of severe tropical cyclones. Heat waves are breaking records with increasing frequency. Droughts are lasting longer and hitting harder. Tornado seasons are becoming less predictable. And yes, winter storms can deliver heavier snowfall when conditions align. The common thread is not uniform warming, but greater volatility.
The counterintuitive reality is that climate change can produce both extreme heat and extreme cold—sometimes in places that rarely experience them. A vivid example came in February 2021, when Winter Storm Uri brought prolonged subfreezing temperatures deep into Texas and across much of the South, overwhelming energy infrastructure that was not designed for sustained cold. The storm caused widespread power outages affecting millions of people, disrupted water systems, and led to significant economic losses. As NOAA has documented, the event illustrated how extreme cold in a warming climate can expose vulnerabilities in systems built around historical assumptions about weather risk.
Outside of the U.S. Europe has seen its share of surprising winter extremes too. In April 2025, an unusually heavy spring storm dumped more than a meter of snow in parts of the Alps, shutting roads and ski areas and triggering widespread disruption In early January 2026, snow and freezing temperatures disrupted travel across Northern Europe, with Britain, France and the Netherlands under cold-weather warnings as snow and ice continued to fall well into the season. The widespread winter impacts in these countries underscore that extreme cold and snow remain part of the weather landscape even as broader climate trends warm the continent.
At the same time, parts of the Arctic and Scandinavia have experienced anomalously warm conditions, with record-breaking heatwaves pushing temperatures into ranges more typical of summer — including multiple days above 30 °C (86 °F) in northern Norway — highlighting how warming at high latitudes can produce winter warmth that feels counterintuitive to many. These episodic warm spells in traditionally frigid regions illustrate how climate change is altering baseline conditions even as it continues to produce extreme weather variability.
Arctic Amplification
One important reason for these seemingly anomalous weather extremes in a warming world is Arctic amplification—the fact that the Arctic is warming significantly faster than lower latitudes. This reduces the temperature gradient that helps keep cold air confined near the poles. As that gradient weakens, the jet stream can become slower and more distorted, allowing cold air to plunge southward while warm air surges northward elsewhere. NOAA’s Arctic Report Card and assessments by the National Academies describe how these changes are increasingly linked to unusual mid-latitude weather patterns, including persistent cold-air outbreaks.
This does not mean that every cold snap or snowstorm can be directly attributed to climate change. Weather has always been variable. But climate change is altering the background conditions in which weather occurs, increasing the odds that when extremes happen, they will be more intense and more disruptive.
The Narrative Challenge
Part of the difficulty with the climate change conversation is that “global warming” is a misleading shorthand for what is actually happening. The phrase suggests a smooth, uniform rise in temperature everywhere, which is not how the system behaves. Even “climate change” can sound gradual and abstract. What we are experiencing is better described as climate destabilization—a shift toward weather that is more extreme, more variable, and harder to predict. Climate science often communicates in global averages. We are told the planet has warmed by just over one degree Celsius and that staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius matters enormously. Those numbers are scientifically precise and critically important, but they are abstract for most people. A degree or two does not feel consequential when you are standing in a snowbank or enduring a record-breaking heat wave.
Extreme weather events, by contrast, are immediate and tangible. Flooded basements, canceled flights, power outages, and closed schools are how most people experience climate change in practice. Ironically, these moments—when climate change becomes most visible—are also when confusion is greatest, precisely because they do not fit the simple “everything gets warmer” narrative.
We need a clearer and more productive way to talk about what is happening. The goal is not to turn every American into a climate scientist or to argue over policy prescriptions. It is to help people understand why the weather feels increasingly erratic and what that means for planning, resilience, and risk. Shoveling snow in my driveway while thinking about climate change is not a contradiction. It is a reflection of reality. The planet is warming on average, and that warming is increasing the instability of weather systems. Some of the resulting extremes involve heat and drought; others involve cold and heavy snow.
We will keep having these conversations every time there is a major weather event—hot, cold, wet, or dry. The question is whether we can move past the confusion and start planning for a world in which extremes are becoming more normal due to climate change. This is the reality facing everyone. Regardless of their politician persuasion.
