The early days of February 1996 were very cold. We have had 4 colder ones in the last two decades but no matter Michael Oppenheimer went on TV and said that such cold Arctic blasts are just what global warming is all about. He said that global warming means higher variability and so what you see is proof of global warming. The evidence on increased variability for either global warming or global cooling is scant to nil. In this case the global warming models show a very modest increased variability in the early years of a ramp-up to a warmed world.
Models are like theory.
You use data to test them. The case for increased variability in the literature and climate change is less than scant. All this blaming got off to a great start with the turn of the new year. The UK Met Office released the pre-news that 1995 was the warmest year on record. It was so important to get the word out in time with the IPCC report that they left December out of their calculations of the global yearly average.