President Donald Trump, who has long expressed skepticism of the scientific consensus on climate change, again brushed aside concerns on Friday by falsely implying that the massive winter storm set to hit much of the U.S. this weekend contradicts the evidence that the planet is getting warmer.
“Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. Rarely seen anything like it before,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday. “Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”
The storm is forecasted to bring damaging ice, heavy snowfall, and gusty winds that could impact more than 230 million people across the country from Friday through Monday. At least 14 states, as well as Washington, D.C., have declared a state of emergency ahead of the storm, which has been named Winter Storm Fern by The Weather Channel. The coming inclement weather has raised alarms about dangerous cold, prolonged power outages, and travel disruptions, with forecasters warning that the storm could prove catastrophic.
Read More: How To Stay Safe and Warm In Extreme Cold Weather
But the idea that brutal winter conditions of this kind mean that climate change isn’t happening, as Trump suggested, is a misconception.
“As a proud ‘environmental insurrectionist,’ it’s frustrating to have to explain this every winter,” says Christopher Callahan, a professor of climate science at Indiana University Bloomington. “The Earth still has seasons, and we’re going to have winter weather no matter what happens with climate change.”
As Callahan explains, the planet is titled on its axis, which is why we get seasons—there are periods of the year when the northern hemisphere is facing away from the sun, which is when that hemisphere experiences winter, while the southern hemisphere experiences summer. And even amid climate change, the Earth still has day-to-day weather events.
“Because climate change is ultimately a longer-term phenomenon, you can have blips around that trend; you can have ups and downs around a longer-term increase in temperature,” Callahan says. “So it’s totally reasonable for us to still have individual storms or individual weather events even though, overall, the planet’s climate is warming.”
Experts agree that, on average, climate change is leading to shorter and milder winters. Research also indicates that climate change can make some extreme weather events—including heat waves, heavy rainfall, severe floods, droughts, extreme wildfires, and hurricanes—more intense and more frequent. Some experts have hypothesized that climate change may be making winter storms more intense as well, though there’s still a “genuine scientific debate” on that, according to Callahan.
But what scientists do agree on, he says, is that, as the planet’s atmosphere gets warmer, it carries more moisture, which leads to more precipitation being released, including snow.“For every degree warmer, you get about 7% more moisture holding capacity in the air, and so we certainly see this happening in summer (with) extreme rain,” Callahan says. “So you could imagine situations in which winter storms have more precipitation and, therefore, more snow than they did before.”
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