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Opinion

When Will the Cold Go Away? Disappointed Public Wakes Up to Climate Reality

Many regions in the Northern Hemisphere are experiencing relatively colder spring conditions.

The residents of New Delhi, India, were particularly miffed at the apparent lack of Delhi’s infamous summer heatwaves and excruciatingly hot weather. In fact, the temperatures dropped to a 70-year low last week when the city received unusually heavy rainfall.

Surprised at the turn of events, one of my friends messaged me, “When will the cold go away…? Why is it so cold at this time of the year?”

The answer to my friend and hundreds of others who read this is: we do not know!

Surprised By Cold: How False Climate Narrative Tricked People’s Perception

Our current understanding of the climate system is not comprehensive enough to predict cold or warm weather patterns. Despite that, global warming enthusiasts have been incorrectly warning people about a climate apocalypse.

But the earth’s climate is a “chaotic” system, i.e., a system that is difficult, indeed impossible, to predict because of its complicated nature and the hundreds of factors that determine its course.

The doomsday ideology—of carbon dioxide (CO2) being the primary driver of global temperatures and that we are heading to an apocalypse—has overshadowed this reality of our climate system.

With the emergence of climate doomsday populism, the CO2 perspective eventually became the only narrative in the news media. Proponents of climate doomsday have made the public believe that the future will be warmer than the present by a significant margin.

The public are told that they will experience milder winters and warmer summers, as the earth warms due to ever increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. When this does not transpire, confusion reigns.

Such was the case in Delhi. The city is infamous for its extreme heat during the summers, partly due to the dense urban settlements that have made it an example of urban heat island effect (UHI).

UHI is a phenomenon when man-made structures in cities make the city warmer than the surrounding rural areas almost all times of the year.

However, despite being a UHI hotspot, Delhi recorded historically low summer temperatures for the month of May this year. Moreover, the city has experienced extremely severe winters during the last three years, even breaking 118-year old records for lowest winter temperatures in the months of December, January and February.

Delhi is not unique. Since the end of El Nino in 2016, hundreds of sites across the Northern Hemisphere have registered all-time record lows. 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021—all have witnessed record lows.

What Do Surprise Cold Events Tell Us?

In a broad sense, these record cold weather events do not allow us to draw any meaningful conclusions regarding the overall trend in the climate system.

However, they do allow us to conclude that the predictions of the climate doomsayers were wrong. In general, the climate doomsayers have called for much warmer summers each year, and none of their predictions allowed for extreme cold weather events, like those this year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Doomsayers’ predictions have fallen flat on their face—another gentle reminder for the public to not go overboard with sensational claims of earth turning into a burning oven.

As for the doomsayers, we shouldn’t be surprised if they come up with a new theory that accommodates these surprise cold trends in their overall doomsday narratives. They have shown proclivity to do so in the past, especially with snowfall events. From predicting “no snow,” they ended up saying “more snow.”

Historic snowfall events engulfed the Northern Hemisphere in recent years, forcing the doomsayers to baptize extreme snowfall events as indicators man-made climate change.

Such are the times. Any and every weather event will be classified as an undesirable consequence of man-made climate change.

To save future disappointments, the public should be informed about the actual reality of the world’s climate: an ideal and optimum one that is enabling human civilization to flourish like never before and is showing no signs of letting us down.

Vijay Jayaraj

Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), a Contributor for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Chennai, India.