News and stories Based on Science Will the earth still have cold weather in a warming world?

Will the earth still have cold weather in a warming world?

Based on Science

Earth will still have cold weather and snowstorms even as the planet continues to warm.

Last update August 12, 2021

Weather and climate are related, but not the same.

Weather refers to the state of the atmosphere from day to day in a given location—cool days, clouds, or thunderstorms, for example. Climate refers to patterns of weather, including averages and extremes over periods of time that are most often 30 years or longer. A warming climate means that, overall, average temperatures are going up.

Think of a sports team. Climate would be like their overall season record. Weather would be like individual games. A team having a winning season might lose a game or two, but on average they win more games than they lose. Similarly, a warming climate can include both hot and cold weather. But on average, there will be more days that are warmer than normal and fewer days that are cooler than normal.

Cold, snowy weather is not evidence against global warming.

Cold conditions—even bitter cold—can still happen in a warming world. For example, record low temperatures plunged the Midwest into a deep freeze in late January 2019. But at any given time, the weather in one area may or may not reflect global trends.

A warming Earth will experience higher average temperatures over time. Those averages can include both hot and cold days. But overall, unusually cold days are becoming less frequent than warmer-than-usual ones.

One way to see this trend is to look at how often new daily high and low temperature records are set. Daily temperatures are measured at hundreds of weather stations around the globe. In the United States, high and low records at weather stations were set at about the same rate in the 1950s. Yet since the late 1960s, the number of record daily high temperatures measured each year has been increasing at a faster rate than record daily low temperatures. This shift is largely due to far fewer record daily low temperatures in recent decades. That pattern was evident in January 2019, when there were 17 cold record temperatures set around the world and 269 heat records.