If we’re going to have headlines “hottest year on record “ to confirm global warming , then what would this coldest record indicate ? I don’t think either are good indicators , just curious why confirming evidence is welcome and detracting evidence is not .
This is why a lot of scientists prefer the term "climate change" over "global warming"--the expected result isn't a uniform "everyone experiences warmer changes" but rather more severe disruptions in climate patterns.
One of those predicted disruptions is a weakening of the margins of the polar vertex. This results in cases where the front of vertex pushes deeply far south. As a result, cold polar air can move deep into the US interior (so, say, 0°F or less in St. Louis) while Alaska is baking in 50-60°F.
In other words, one of the predictions of global warming is that the US will see an increase in extreme cold events in winter even as the average Earth temperature is increasing.
IIUC but global warming is somewhat of a misnomer for local weather effects, which can include colder winters; i.e. global warming is thought to cause more extreme weather in general.
You clearly don't understand what is happening. The increase in CO2 causes wilder swings in weather, leading to more and more extremes. It also perturbed the Jet Stream, leading us to get in the USA what had been weather confined to the Arctic. This outcome is PRECISELY what had been predicted for the worst effects of climate change.
In fact, the amount of CO2 that we have already released has triggered the knock-on effects, which is the melting of permafrost and the subsequent release of vast quantities of Methane gas, which is 84 times more damaging than CO2.
Unfortunately, climate is not simple. By definition it is a complicated effect. But the coldest February ever seen is 100% in agreement with the predictions in Climate change.
So your claim is that the climate change predictions are that increased CO2 will cause an increase in extreme cold temperature events like we saw in the US recently.
But extreme cold events like that have been decreasing over the years, not increasing. We have been experiencing fewer cold waves in the US.
Given the predictions you described, does the fact of fewer cold waves make you doubt that climate change is happening?
It indicates global warming as well. Colder weather is occurring below the Arctic because the polar air is getting pushed down (my laymen's understanding), and the Arctic winters are getting warmer and warmer as a trend.
I would look towards the oceans if I wanted to see the effect of warming. From what I keep hearing, every year has a new "hottest year on record" for the average temperature measured by satellites.
Not quite every year, since there is occasionally a year that is even hotter than the normal trend that doesn't get beat for a few years, e.g. 2016, but all of the past six years are in the top 6 hottest.
It's not a matter of welcome vs unwelcome, it's a matter of global & persistent vs local and transient. Or, to put it another way, the larger your sample size, the better the signal-to-noise ratio is. So a single-month anomaly in one country isn't nearly as meaningful as a global anomaly over a whole year (which in turn is less meaningful than a global multi-year average).
And this is just local & transient. There's a good article that discusses this (and related things) at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-t.... Take a look at the temperature anomaly map at the bottom; it shows a big colder-than-usual area over the central US, and another over Siberia. But it also shows warmer-than-usual areas in between them (around the North Pole), and another in Southern Asia. And it lists the "World" anomaly as 0.0 °C. So it's not that everything was colder, it was just that the cold was in different places than usual, and we happened to be one of the colder-than-usual places.
But that map is just for February 19. When I look at the map for today (https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom), I see a cold area across part of Russia, and another around Alaska, but also warm bands across the Eastern US, Asia-Mideast-part-of-Africa, and parts of Antarctica. The World anomaly is listed as +0.4°C. Neither of these single-day maps tells you that much about what's going on in the longer term.
Similarly, this anomalous cold month in the US was just February. According to the report: "Meteorological winter (December through February) was quite mild and dry across the contiguous U.S. The average temperature was 33.6 degrees F, 1.4 degrees above average, placing Winter 2021 in the warmest third of the winter record. Maine had its third-warmest winter; California had its 12th warmest." So while February was colder than usual here, December and January were warm enough to more than make up for it.
You can certainly find many days and months where it was unusually cold in a particular country or region, and many where it was much hotter than usual in a particular country or region. But that doesn't really mean much of anything; you really need to look at averages over larger areas and longer times.
