The Daily: 10 February 2026

The wintry weather up and down the eastern seaboard sure has people chattering. Or maybe their teeth are chattering and words are just, inevitably, dribbling out. From the Carolinas right through to Nova Scotia, it has been cold this last week. Though… It’s been cold here in Vermont since Thanksgiving. It’s just been a cold winter. In January, we had several days where the highs never reached 0°F. (Like today…) Lows have been below zero (-17.8°C) so frequently, I lost count when I tried to add them up. It was over 50 days.

It’s also been a snowy winter. However, we really haven’t had that much total snow accumulation. It’s been snowing nearly every day, though it rarely adds more than an inch to the pile. Usually, it’s a dusting that only serves to make the roads slick. But because we’ve had exactly three days of temperatures in the melting range in January, most of the snow that has fallen is still on the ground piled in thin-layered stratigraphy about three to four feet high. (It’s deeper under the deciduous trees because there hasn’t been enough sun to partially melt and therefore compact the top layers. My jungle is inaccessible for the moment. Probably for the month…)

But all this cold has the denial folks going on about “What climate change?“. Truthfully, it’s prompting questions even among those who have no doubts that the planet is warming. “What’s with this cold!” The local newspaper felt compelled to run an explainer, saying that this weather is not unprecedented. It’s just that we haven’t experienced what used to be normal in a very long time. But that’s not completely the case. This is not unprecedented in effect, though not in cause. These temperatures used to be normal. This winter is similar to an average winter in the 1980s, but the reason for this once-average cold is entirely new — and, paradoxically, it is completely because of global warming,

Used to be that winter was colder everywhere. I can remember multiple blizzards on the various winter birthdays in my family and many January weeks of temperatures below zero (°F), even as far south as New Mexico. I had a lovely Arp rosemary shrub in my New Mexico herb bed for many years. This bed was in a protected spot by the back door, sheltered from wind and receiving eight hours of sunshine even in winter. Then, sometime around 2005, the rosemary was killed by a winter cold snap that lasted a week, dropping temperatures to -10°F each night. I had to dig out the whole shrub, which was withered and black and smelling rather foul. (Who knew that happened…) But that never happened again. I planted another bush, and the newcomer fairly took over the herb bed. Rosemary-killing temperatures no longer happen in Albuquerque (and rosemary is happy about that…). Except for the highest elevations in the northern mountains, it hasn’t been that cold for a couple decades. Though the last two Januaries came close…

And these recent winter cold snaps are important evidence. But not of what the deniers think. This cold winter weather is not evidence that warming isn’t happening. It’s not even true that we’re seeing a reversal of trends, that the cold is triggered by some factor that is reducing atmospheric carbon and/or surface temperatures. No, this cold is happening explicitly because temperatures are rising — further and faster than we ever thought possible. Just… not so much here…

I’ve talked before about why winter will still be cold off and on, despite the heated atmosphere, but it might be time for a brief refresher.

The planet’s average temperature is going up, and going up fast. We are well ahead of the modeled schedule for increasing temperatures. When I was in grad school, rubbing shoulders with some of the best climate scientists in the world, the common view was that we would see 1.5-3°C by the end of this century. They were wrong. We have already breached 1.5° — in 2024, seventy years ahead of schedule. Now, they’re saying that we might see 3° by 2050, which is just terrifying to me. (Especially because they got the timing wrong before… who’s to say it’s accurate now? Could be as early as… 2030…)

But even so, there will be winter in Vermont, maybe even in New Mexico. Why? Because two stastisticky, mathy things…

One: the global temperature is an average. The average temperature is rising, but some places may be warming faster than others. And this is, in fact, the case. Because the second important thing is that we know from extensive hard data that the poles are heating much, much faster than equatorial regions. And the north, with its lack of land mass, is warming faster than the south. The cumulative warming experienced in the north polar region has been over twice that of the rest of the globe since 1980, and it’s been warming at a rate that is nearly three times faster than the planetary average since 2000. Average temperatures in the Arctic are already 2°C higher than pre-20th-century averages. Think about that…

Mathing that out, you will quickly note that if the Arctic is warming that much faster than the rest of the globe, then the rest of the globe is not warming as much. (Duh…) An average of 1.5°C over the whole planet with the poles warming faster translates into less warming, or even stasis, in equatorial regions to balance out the average. What this means for high-latitude regions is that the difference in temperature between local conditions and polar conditions is becoming less. And what this means is that circumpolar air flow, dependent on a sharp temperature differential at around 60° latitude (the border-land of sunless winter) for stable linear flow, is breaking down.

(There are other factors influencing how we experience average warming, like the fact that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and increases cooling cloud-cover in humid climates and that, like the Arctic and for many of the same reasons, temperate-climate summers are warming faster than winters… but the big thing overall is the play between polar warming rates and global warming rates.)

I’m sure you’ve all seen the graphics of a droopy polar vortex, draping itself all over the northern regions of America and Eurasia. Maps regularly feature blobby blue air masses dripping as far south as Oklahoma in the US. We’ve seen ice storms in Texas. Florida’s citrus harvest has been lackluster in many recent years (though that is as much due to drought as bud-freeze). And the Northeast?

We get purple.

I hadn’t actually seen purple on local weather maps until recently. This is the hue they’ve trotted out for both extreme cold temperatures and extreme storms. The weather folks ran out of colors, I guess. What they probably want is infrared and ultraviolet… but those aren’t gonna read well on a map…

In any case, this is going to continue for the foreseeable future. Because, while it is getting warmer up there in the Arctic, it’s still bloody cold. Polar air may not be as different as is used to be from New England and the upper Midwest, but it is still colder than these lower latitudes. More importantly, it is much colder than what we experience as our normal temperatures, especially as our normal is warming. It may be slower paced warming than the Arctic, but we’re warming all the same.

For those who don’t get to viscerally feel below-zero temperatures, let me tell you that there is a big difference between a daytime high of 20°F and a high of 10°F. But, and this is crucial, once the temperature drops below about 5°, it’s very hard to tell how cold it is. A human body adapted to temperate climates simply can’t perceive temperatures below that. It’s all Cold. So… Most winters here in New England in the last twenty or so years have seen average highs in the low 20s (°F), which is notably warmer than it used to be. We can feel it. Or rather, we’ve stopped feeling Cold. We’ve even sort of forgotten what Cold feels like. Except when the polar air comes to call.

Having acclimated to a warming trend, we now experience what used to be normal as unprecedented. We notice it. We feel it. And, my sons have reminded me, it is unprecedented for everyone of millennial age and younger. They’ve never lived through winters like this…

But it’s not cold because global warming is a hoax. It’s because global warming is all too real. It’s cold because the Arctic is not as arctic as it used to be. It’s cold because there isn’t enough difference in temperature between the sunless Arctic and much more southerly, sunny places like New England to channel the Arctic air into a strong circumpolar flow. It’s cold because it is already too bloody hot.

Of course, our place-based bodies don’t understand things like this. Scale is too much for us. Complexity is right out. What we feel is Cold. And we wonder what’s going on…

Some folks like this weather. I sure like cold better than hot. You can always warm up. Cooling off is impossible. And there are fringe benefits. For example, watching moisture crystallize out of clear blue skies, setting the air to glittering, is one of the most stunningly beautiful phenomena I know. And stars don’t waver when the temperatures drop this low. The sky is so close, you feel you could reach out and pluck a glowing orb for a midnight snack. And my apples and potatoes have been quite happily rot-free down in the very cold basement all winter. So… I’m not entirely upset about Cold.

But I am very concerned about the cause of this cold… And I wish more people could understand what’s going on. Because this is unprecedented… And I don’t like the implications… And I think if everyone internalized just how horrifying this is, and for what reasons, and how much worse it will be in a very short time, there might be a bit more urgency to finding ways to cope with all the aspects of climate change. Like Cold in the middle of unprecedented warming…

---

©Elizabeth Anker 2026