Media rushes to remind everyone that 1 extremely cold event doesn't debunk global warming

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The massive cold weather front descending over the Midwest this week has commentators straining for analogies (“Deep Freeze,” “Arctic Outbreak” and “Ice Age”) and at least some people wondering what has become of global warming.

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One NOAA official denied that the agency's tweet about the cold snap was intended to refute Trump's declarations on the issue. "Our mission is to share timely and relevant contextual information with the public," said David Herring, who is program manager of the Climate.gov website for the science agency. "We get questions routinely when there are extreme weather events and whether there is a connection to climate science."

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In a stable climate, the ratio of new record highs to new record lows is approximately even, scientists said. But in the past year in the U.S., the clear warming trend has remained in evidence, with record high temperatures recorded nearly twice as often as record lows. Several days of low temperatures this week will not be nearly enough to reverse that trend.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist who is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, agreed that anomalous cases should not distract from what has become the norm. “The basics — it’s getting warmer on average, there are more anomalous highs than anomalous lows and there is more intense rainfall — covers 90 percent of the cases,” Schmidt said.

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