It is tempting to think of cold as an actual positive thing not just the absence of heat. Especially if you encounter it in all its fury without the “modern miracle” (in entrepreneur Michael Binnion’s phrase) of hydrocarbon energy that helps us build weather-resistant buildings then heat them. If it were minus 21C and you lived in a mud hut you wouldn’t live long. But even in modern houses you have to take care. As the UK Met warned, courtesy of “Age Scotland’s policy director”, whatever that might be, “If heating your home is a challenge, try and stay warm in the room or place you will spend most of your time by wearing layered clothing, taking warm drinks and food with some regular movement to help with circulation and keeping your muscles active.” And why is heating our homes a challenge? Because the nitwits in charge decided warmth was so deadly they had to trash the energy sector to make it stop. Just as stupidity feels like an actual thing not just the absence of intelligence, when the cold reaches into your living room it feels like an active and malign presence.
As for instance when the Weather Network reports that “A chilly, snowy start to the year is underway across southern Ontario as an Arctic airmass flexes its influence over the region.” But in fact in some sense it flexes its lack of influence, because when a “polar vortex” sends it cascading south, it’s really just an absence of heat leaving the Arctic in massive quantities which, which, according to one of our webinar guests Javier Vinos, might well mean more heat is able to reach the Arctic and get radiated out. In which case, contrary to orthodoxy, the Arctic heating faster than normal while North America and Europe are gripped by biting cold could be not the result of warming but the cause of cooling.
We don’t really have enough historical data to know. And as always, when something is highly variable you need longer time series to see whether there’s any meaningful departure from the trend. For instance, Chris Martz posted on New Year’s Eve that in the United States:
“On New Year’s Eve in 1965, 65% of the Lower 48 was at or above 50° and 44% of the country reached 60°. It was a balmy 70° in Washington, D.C. and 63° in both New York and Boston.”
As he went on to add:
“A carbon tax could have prevented that environmental catastrophe.”
Which may be snide. But it’s by no means unfair because of course if the U.S. had experienced those conditions in 2025, instead of what actually happened, it would be cited as proof of climate breakdown thingy and the need for carbon taxes or some other vigorous measure to combat the dreaded “carbon pollution”.
Now we said “as always” above. But in fact a key feature of climate alarmism has been to ignore this issue completely, and treat, say, a 25-year pattern in Arctic ice as proof positive of a rupture with all past history and prehistory. And so a winter such as we’re currently having, again, does rebut their claims. And if you respond that it only proves that their claims were silly, well, we’ve been making precisely that point for years because so many politicians and celebrities have completely and even wilfully overlooked it.
