Brrrrrrrr! It's winter. Happens every year.

It’s been every cold in Minnesota, the U.S. as a whole, and Europe this last month.  Meanwhile, human-caused CO2 is still driving climate change.  (Discussing that is a very detailed article in the second half of this article.)

Yes — it’s the coldest part of winter, exactly when we expect the coldest weather.  Remember last winter?  Same thing happened.  That’s because of “seasons” which at least half of Americans experience or are aware of.  The people who don’t are apparently the climate change deniers, who keep forgetting there’s a thing called “winter”.  Winter cold is caused by the less-intense solar power here in the Northern hemisphere, due to the tilt of the earth this time of year as we travel around the Sun.   Funny thing though, in winter we are actually closer to the Sun, as a planet.  So solar activity and proximity does not cause winter.  In addition, much of our cold and warm winter fluctuations depend on occasional el Ninos and La Ninas.  Sometimes they even combine to really screw things up.  Solar variations only have a mild influence on weather and climate.

I’d be worried if it wasn’t very cold in January, like I was worried 4-5 years ago, when it wasn’t.  About five years ago my memory tells me that January was still cold, but not nearly as cold, and for less of an amount of time than in the past.  This seemed to be a trend, which  I noticed all on my own.  But, I realize people have to be careful “recognizing” trends that only last a couple of years because the time period is not long enough to indicate a true trend.  Then last year and this one, the weather seems again to be colder, longer, than during the trend I thought I had observed of a warming January over several years.

Weather is only weather, and trends in climate are only observable over decades and centuries.  Even then, they may not hold true every year because there are fluctuation years.  I learned only recently that the “Little Ice Age” lasted into the 1800s.  Since then, people claim we are still coming out of the Little Ice age, but were were well out of it by the time of my memories of my earliest winters in Minnesota, where the snow came up to the roof of my house every December and it was brutally cold.  So the end of that cold trend did not affect the cold weather years I remember. Memories are also tricky things, especially memories of weather. You always remember the most severe more than the typical.  Even so, I remember winters much colder, that lasted longer, than they are today — even this year.    So while the last few weeks have been painfully cold in my area, they are not unusual or strangely cold at all.

The skeptics and climate change deniers I see spreading their disinformation all over the place online, who maybe don’t even realize [...]