Most of the cold air was locked up over the Artic this past winter, whereas normally it is carried south by the jet streams. Some areas of the planet did have record cold in February. An article about February's snow in Baghdad, Iraq (the second snowfall in the last 100 years) says the warm winter in Virginia had to do with the "north atlantic oscillation" [NAO]:

> So why is it that we seem to be in a snow hole?

> Part of it has to do with something called the North Atlantic Oscillation. This combines the effect of two features in the atmosphere; the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. - https://www.wsls.com/weather/2020/02/12/baghdad-sees-rare-sn...

Having just used the "disable javascript to read the article" trick, I noticed this Economist article correctly points out the NAO's influence in keeping cold air locked up in the Arctic, but doesn't mention the snow in Baghdad nor the blizzards in Turkey [0] nor the record colds elsewhere (certain places in Canada, eastern Russia, etc)

Wikipedia has this page on the North Atlantic Oscillation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation

[0] https://www.ntvhouston.com/2020/02/blizzard-buries-turkish-v...

I read reports of potato farmers in Idaho having to deal with an early frost last fall, and racing to harvest the potatoes before they were ruined by an early cold snap. I don't know how much of their crops were lost. I've also noticed reports of a sugar shortage.

Humans need to work on being climate-flexible, not being "all in" on global warming.

"A false dilemma (or sometimes called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy in which a statement falsely claims an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional logically valid option." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

The false dilemma presented in this article is that of "global warming" vs. "the old climate status quo". The third logically valid option is that climate is now cooling due to the solar cycle. I read a great article about one of the solar telescopes having measured slight changes in the sun's output over the last 20+ years... The data is out there, scientists just have to consider the full spectrum of climate possibilities.

[Edit] I thought the article was about the SOHO satellite, but maybe it was about instruments on the International Space Station. These pages mention European solar observatories on the space station:

> The Sun does not always shine with unchanging power: its output varies minutely over the period of about 11 years known as the ‘solar cycle’. In principle, these fluctuations can affect us on Earth.

- http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...

> This is where the Solspec instrument comes in. Part of the Solar package on the International Space Station, it was launched with the European Columbus space laboratory in 2008 and tracked the Sun until it was shut down this year [2017]. It measured the energy of each wavelength in absolute terms and its variability – a feat that requires a higher order of precision than relative measurements. As an analogy, it is easy to feel a change in temperature, but nobody on Earth can sense the exact temperature without a thermometer.

- http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...