Essay by Eric Worrall
Last week my family enjoyed a BBQ with friends at a seaside park on the beautiful Fraser Coast. But apparently are all suffering a climate catastrophe.
JAN 31, 2026 7:23 AM AET
Snow Storms in North America. A Record Heat Wave in Australia. Is This Climate Change?
by Simmone Shah
REPORTERExtreme weather events are battering both ends of the world this week. In the U.S., Winter Storm Fern set snow records in parts of the country last weekend, quickly followed by one of the longest cold-air outbreaks in decades. A bomb cyclone is expected to hit the southeast over the weekend. Across the globe in southern Australia, a heat dome is setting records, with temperatures reaching 120°F—the most severe heat wave the country has experienced in 16 years.
It’s difficult to outright blame climate change for any one specific weather event, but as our planet warms, it could mean that extremes of all kinds, occurring at the same time around the world, could become the norm.
…
From hot days to snow storms, hurricanes and droughts, extreme weather events have always been natural. “We’ve had extreme weather as long as we have records of weather information,” says Lackmann. But research shows that climate change is making them more frequent and intense. “What we’re finding is that the intensity and the frequency of the most extreme events is certainly likely to have the DNA of climate change,” says Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society.
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What remains clear is that frigid temperatures and piles of snow by no means disproves climate change. “People will say things like, ‘Hey, it’s snowing. That must mean there’s no such thing as global warming.’” says Shepherd. “I said, ‘No, that just means it’s January in the wintertime.’”
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Read more: https://time.com/7362792/snow-north-america-australia-heat-wave-climate/
If global warming causes unusually hot AND unusually cold weather, what does global cooling cause? Abnormally normal weather?
Actually we know the answer to what the weather is like when the world cools, and the answer is not good.
A climate of conflict: How the little ice age sparked rebellions and revolutions across Europe
Author links open overlay panel
David Kaniewski a 1, Nick Marriner b 1, Frédéric Luce a, Morgane Escarpe a, Majid Pourkerman c, Thierry Otto a
Highlights
- •A study based on 140 rebellions and revolutions during the Little Ice Age.
- •Climate impacted livelihoods, causing poor harvests and higher grain prices.
- •Led to malnutrition, which increased people’s vulnerability.
- •Climate did not generate crises but sowed the seeds for uprisings.
Abstract
The Little Ice Age (LIA) – lasting from ∼1250 to ∼1860 – was a long period of cooler, drier conditions, characterized by increased climate instability. The most significant climate extremes were more closely associated with interannual temperature variations or particularly severe, isolated cold spells than with prolonged cold spells lasting many years. During this pre-industrial phase of climate instability, many rebellions broke out, one of the most famous being the French Revolution of 1789. A key question, however, relates to the precise and often intricate role of climate in precipitating these widespread uprisings and rebellions that profoundly reshaped human institutions, particularly in the European context. Using data for solar activity, temperature, precipitation, volcanic forcing and the evolution of grain prices, we compared and contrasted the occurrence of rebellions and revolutions across a wide geographical area comprising Europe-Russia-Ottoman Empire with LIA climate and hazards. We find that climate change primarily affected people’s livelihoods by reducing harvests, lowering food-resource availability and sharply increasing cereal prices. Climate therefore played a major role in heightening population vulnerability by exacerbating one of the greatest scourges: malnutrition. For the populace, this fuelled social anger towards political authorities for failing to mitigate the impact of climate change. This study primarily reveals that environmental causes did not generate social crises during the LIA but rather triggered a cascade of environmental and human events that interacted, ultimately leading to highly conflictual situations. The LIA serves as a warning to modern political systems, highlighting the necessity to anticipate the consequences of current climate change to mitigate its impact on societies and prevent social unrest and conflict.
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Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818125003479
Given the Little Ice Age was a period of dreadful weather and unstable climatic conditions, and global warming is supposed to bring dreadful weather and unstable climatic conditions, are climate alarmists seriously expecting us to believe the current climate, or perhaps the climate of a hundred years ago, was the perfect balance?
How unlikely is it that out of all the Earth’s climate epochs, through the Earth’s long climate history, we just happen to be living through the century of climate perfection?
Doesn’t it seem more likely if cooler global temperatures bring horrible weather, warmer global temperatures will bring better weather?
We do have paleo evidence warm conditions are more benign. Our monkey ancestors thrived in the hothouse world of the PETM, 5-8C hotter than today. They colonised much of Northern Europe and Russia, only retreating from their new homes when the cold returned.
Fish also thrived during the PETM.
I’m not suggesting weather is a long linear continuum of warmer = better weather across all possible global temperatures, but the alarmist suggestion that we happen to live in a narrow turning point of perfection is absurd.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I don’t see anyone providing evidence to support the implicit claim that our current climate state, or the climate state of the recent past, is the perfect state we should aspire to.
Troughers gotta trough .
And cluck . BOK ! BOK !
😉
And in the continental US, it was warmer in the 1930’s. But the Satanic Gasses were at a lower level, so we really need some hand waving.
Without the global warming of the sun, all flora and fauna on earth would not even exist
The sun’s shortwave radiation output varies up and down, impacts a non-uniform, rotating sphere, and cause all sorts of random/chaotic phenomena, including tides, shifting tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, venting, etc., to take place.
To think, 325 ppm of CO2 plays any definable/measurable role in this process, is off-the-charts demented, despite pronouncements by:
1) the discredited IPCC, with its “proprietary science”, and
2) self-serving bureaucrats and wealthy elites, whose main aims are more power, wealth and control over all of us, while holding up their ECO-Cross calling for sacrifice, as did the RC Church in the Middle Ages.
I’m not sure the ‘wealthy elites’ are as interested in power, wealth and control as they are in impressing their neighbors by caring for the po’ folks. After all they just think that us Walmart shopper here in flyover country are too dumb and uneducated to look after ourselves, and they, in their infinite wisdom, know what’s best for us. Democracy will never work. We need a socialist oligarchy with them in control to properly guide us :<)
You have describe perfectly the deplorables.
At the Mauna Loa Obs. in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in the air is currently 427 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has mass of 1,290 g and contains a mere 0.84 g of CO2 at STP. There is too little CO2 in the air to have any effect on air temperature, weather and climate. In winter CO2 hibernates.
CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Who your gonna believe; me or your lying eyes?
It is not, and never has been, about any real threat to the planet. It is, and always has been, about stoking hysteria to convince people to give up their liberty to a global elite who seek to control the global economy and all wealth and power.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H. L. Mencken
Wait for AI to boost government efficiency. (Do I need a sarcasm tag?)
Hot is the new cold…and cold is the new hot – now it all makes sense…
It’s just a variation of Mike’s Nature trick.
I asked Google Gemini what climate change wouldn’t look like. This was the response:
A stable climate would feature predictable, consistent, and stable seasonal weather patterns over centuries.
Aside from the subjective qualifiers, what it’s suggesting is that the hockey stick is supposed to be all shaft, no blade, forever (ostensibly, for the duration of the Holocene interglacial, anyway). What got me was the “stable seasonal weather” part, because this has never been observed in human history, outside of the equatorial region.
I’ve been bemused myself by the desire to achieve a “stable climate.” I wondered what that even meant. So it means weather that’s predictable and consistent and… yeah, something the weather never has been.
You cannot be serious… the cold and frost in the northern hemisphere hemisphere and in equatorial parts of India and even colder weather in Singapore are the signs of little ice age induced by grand solar minimum similar to that occurred during maunder minimum(1645-1710).
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243
All the dates of Lia shown in this article are wrong. The other cold little ice age was during the other grand solar minimum -wolf one occurred 330 years later.
While the extra heat in Australia is caused by the solar inertial motion moving the sun closer to the earth orbit in February- August of each year of the current millennium 1600-2600. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/75534.
At the moment the solar inertial motion prevails as the grand solar minimum just started showing up. however with every year towards the solar minimum the gsm will be taking over reducing the terrestrial temperature by about 1C as it was during maunder minimum.
To label certain weather conditions as extreme is disingenuous (dishonest). It suggests that there is normal and extreme weather while in reality there is a huge range of weather conditions. We also know that what some describe as extreme in one place is normal in another.
Take snowfall. Twelve centimeters of snow cover in Dublin in February would be considered extreme but in Moscow normal. In 2010 Dublin had a substantial amount of snow for weeks. Historical records indicate some far heavier snowfalls over the past century. Moscow, however, only had no snow in February a few times the past century.
The phrase, “extreme weather” began to be used with the rise of climate alarmism in the 1990s. It is misleading but used to promote a false climate narrative. We need to call out the alarmists on their sloppy use of language as well as of science.
In reporting things, they love to use a superlative whenever possible. The highest since …, the lowest since… etc.
The snow we had here in central was reported as “the most since 1978”. Technically true but that means we had more snow in 1978.
Same goes for high temperatures. A heat wave is always “the hottest since…”. And the “since” always seems to more recent than the 1930’s.
A reasonable, not too “activist” report on the Aussie heat wave.
Yes a couple of records broken, but it is very much from a “stuck” weather system
And it isn’t overly affecting the major population centres, just the outback regions of NSW, Victoria and SA
Heatwave to ease this weekend after final searing burst
Where I am it reached upper 30’s (C) on Saturday and Sunday, but nothing out of the ordinary..
Forecast top for today is in the low 20’s (C)
What none of these people speak about is that temperatures just above 30⁰C in a very humid place is unbearable without air conditioning while 35⁰C in a very dry desert area is quite bearable. Similarly 1⁰C with sunshine and no wind is pleasant but 1⁰C on an overcast day with wind chill driving it down to -6⁰C is really miserable. None of the temperature measurements give the context and discomfort levels which are subjective.
Wow… Hot in Australia, while its cold in the USA… In February…
UNHEARD OF !!! 😉
My fiancé is on a long planned 5 week wildlife photography trip to Australia. She says it is uncomfortably hot for her, coming from the San Fransisco Bay Area last week. I told her better there than here right now in Chicagoland. We are have two unbroken weeks of never above freezing, and we just had three days where the highs were 7, 8, 9 F. We should finally get a high above freezing this coming Friday—33F.
I remember the 50s and the 60s growing up in Chicago…Winter was always like that and people tried everything like engine block heaters, heat lamps, electric oil pan heaters,etc, so they could start their cars in the morning. Many a car fire in those days. I developed a life long dislike of being chilled to the bone…still have it even tho I moved South…and the cold has followed me! And everybody carried jumper cables and canned starting fluid.
Lived in Chicagoland from spring 1983 to ye2000. So experienced personally its coldest January day ever in 1985—minus 27F with windchill minus 60F. Had sort of forgotten that spending the next 25 years on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. But, my significant other (met there in 2001) passed away mid 2024. I decided to sell our beach condo and move back to my place here until my new fiancé and I figure out where is next, a home we buy in her beloved Moraga Ca where she is renting, or her existing townhome in Rhode Island—not here! So this January has been a brutal reminder. The January low was ‘only’ minus 10F, wind chill minus 30.
Same here in Wokeachusetts. My dad did all of those things. I hated hearing the engine struggle to start- and when it didn’t, dad would call AAA. Now, cars are better at starting in cold weather, but I sure love my garage. Until this winter, in the last 20 years, it never got below freezing in the garage, which is under part of the house. It’s now about 20 F in there and my garage doors aren’t working right. Got a garage door mechanic coming this morning.
So long as she keeps hydrated, wears a full brimmed hat, and avoids the Aussie outback in summer…
… she’ll be right, mate !!
Where was she mainly visiting ? Some of our more interesting critters can be a bit elusive at times.
Tasmania, NSW, Queensland.
Not a problem then.. But keep that hat on when outside. !
Rud, I have lived relatively close to the Australian East coast around Sydney for most of the last 70 years. Nothing much has changed outside but we do now have excellent ducted A/C in house 🙂
We walk often on the beach and can safely say that the coast looks the same as it always has.
Where we are it can be very hot and alternately very much cooler in summer (today only 21C max) The alleged “heat waves” have been no such thing where we are, this is the definition from our very own and infamous Bureau of Meteorology:
“A heatwave is when the maximum and minimum temperatures are unusually hot over 3 days. This is compared to the local climate and past weather.
It takes more than a high daily maximum temperature to make a heatwave. It’s also about how much it cools down overnight”
Even they understand it. This summer we have seen a few hot days(ie 1-2 at a time) and the MSM is callling then “heat waves”
Hot days are normal enough, and have alweays been part of life to the south/east of a huge desert land mass.
I hope your wife enjoys her trip, there is much to see and do. It is often a long way between stops though.
My younger years were in the Cronulla/Sutherland area. Now up near Newcastle
I concur with everything you just said
Went to my old stomping grounds recently, beaches looked the same as 40 years ago.
Sea level rise.. certainly nothing noticeable..
The eastern fringe of NSW is a great place to live, great weather, can get hot for a few days each summer, and if slightly inland, can get a bit nippy in winter mornings.
To get below zero C, usually need to get up into the great dividing range somewhere.
Snow in the northern hemisphere winter … heat wave in the southern hemisphere summer … at the same time? How can this be?!?
Its the Devil wot done it. Really! It couldn’t be just weather or cycles …maybe global warming or trace gases…or gasp! climate change? No, it’s gotta be the Devil…
It was witches wot dunnit! And they turned me into a newt! I got better!
Last week my family enjoyed a BBQ
Really? Can’t be having that…
Tomatoes Face the Axe Under Labour’s ‘Nonsensical’ Junk Food Crackdown
Labour’s “nonsensical” junk food crackdown could see tomatoes kicked out of pasta sauces and ready meals. The Telegraph has more.
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/02/01/tomatoes-face-the-axe-under-labours-nonsensical-junk-food-crackdown/
This is what we get by allowing people to refer to climate change when what they are fighting against is catastrophic runaway global warming caused by added CO2. The American Revolution apparently wasn’t caused by climate change. The Little Ice Age was with us for centuries 1250-1860 probably 30 generations. It is all generation after generation knew, why would the only climate they have ever known cause them to riot? This is stupid. Corrupt people controlling their lives is far more likely.
As our planet continues to warm from the depths of the Little Ice Age, we should regularly thank our lucky stars that we are possibly approaching a modern climate optimum. With several orders of magnitude more species existing in the tropical biosphere as opposed to the polar regions, it takes some incredible pretzelly logic to try and claim that rising global temperatures are a threat to anything besides the ice in your cocktail! Humans are a tropical species; I invite anyone who disagrees to try surviving year round in northern Canada or Eurasia without the benefit of plentiful fossil fuels!
We really need to start the discussion about climate reparations; not for the imaginary dangers of CAGW, but for the TRILLIONS of dollars mega-corporations and billionaires have plundered from the world economy at the behest of the charlatans and ideologues in our global elite, to solve a non-existent problem with inefficient and unreliable 17th Century solutions!
I used to grade student evaluations of environmental biological papers. Never had anything like this nonsense. Wonder how they grade these now?
From the link—
“Attribution studies, which are able to quantify climate change’s influence on an individual weather event, show that climate change is playing a role in supercharging devastating and deadly weather events.”
From their link— https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-increased-the-likelihood-of-wildfire-disaster-in-highly-exposed-los-angeles-area/
“To determine the role of climate change in this observed trend we combine the observation-based estimates with climate models. Eight of the eleven models examined also show an increase in extreme January FWI, increasing our confidence that climate change is driving this trend….Our observational analysis shows that the frequency of an atmospheric circulation pattern such as that of January 8th 2025, which is known to strengthen Santa Ana wind events, has increased in winter, raising the risk of weather conditions that drive the spread of wildfire. Whether this trend is attributable to human-caused climate change requires a more in depth study of the patterns in observations and climate models….. ”
Their Figure 2b Cumulative Annual Rainfall over the Study Area compares 1940-2022 to within the ranges of 2022-2023, 2023-2024-2025(January). I guess they got this right “Additionally, above-average precipitation in winters of 2022/23 and 2023/24 had previously encouraged vegetation growth, providing more fuel for the fires.”
I would say that they “Bombed Out” according to their attribution methods. They also missed the ‘Bomb’ currently racing across the Atlantic, what are the odds it will hit Australia? About as crazy as using all these superlative attributions nowadays.
Here again we see the mainstream media jumping on any weather/climate extreme and using it as guaranteed proof of global warming, climate change or some sort of catastrophe (man-made, of course, and from burning fossil fuels, naturally) Except poll after survey worldwide keep showing that people attach a low priority to climate action, particularly since they know it will adversely impact their living costs and convenience while making a negligible difference to not only daily weather events but also long-term climate patterns. Besides, almost all changes that do occur have been easily handled by modern climate control technologies. So there’s nothing to lose sleep about.
” … what does global cooling cause? Abnormally normal weather? ”
! Excellent !
Last Saturday, our family and friends enjoyed a salad lunch at home in Sydney in the courtyard under a large green grape vine in a pleasant 27 degrees C, occasionally eating sweet grapes from the vine. The last few years’ plant growth in our area has been greatly boosted by the extra CO2 available and we are taking full advantage of it.
I’m being censored from having perfectly nice conversations with normal contributors.. WTF !!!
If it appears you’re doing the crap I’ve told you not to do, I delete. I don’t take the time to find the nuanced context in every comment. If it remotely appears you are disparaging another commentor or doing the idiotic “no evidence” thing, which I consider harassment and have told you, I delete. I do this in lieu of a ban. I wish I had to tools to limit you to ten comments a day, but I don’t have that level of granular control. I may occasionally delete incorrectly. If so. Whoops.
Rabid censorship, in other words.
Really sad that asking for evidence when someone continually runs away from producing any … is considered harassment !
evidence that has been offered to you thousands of times. you simply choose to not consider it evidence. that’s why it is now officially harassment for you to badger people about “evidence”.
Except it has been just mantra BS.. not scientific evidence.
And evidence put forward has been shown to be bogus.
This all started with your friend Richard Greene, who slithered like a little eel, and who you protected from having to produce anything…..
He is now banned… think about that.
In recent weeks, I received two “extreme weather” alerts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
for temperatures of 29C in Greater Western Sydney in January.
Just farcical.
Pleasant summer day 🙂
It’s actually quite mild for mid-summer in Greater Western Sydney.
Once again, climate change cannot cause weather change. It defies the definition of climate.
Climate is defined as 30 years of weather in a given area. The weather must therefore change first, and for 30 years. It is cause and effect, and placing the cart before the horse does not work per the definition. It is plainly illogical and therefore must be rejected.
Eric,
I am finalizing a lot of work into an article about Australian heat and heatwaves.
A core finding is that an author can play any tune depending on how well cherry picking is used.
The historic temperature data are susceptible to choice of the time period studied.
Here is a graph showing Sydney history by year, the hottest day each year shown with the straight lines, the linear trends. I call this a 1-DAY heatwave. (Findings are similar for 3-DAY, 5-DAY and 10-DAY).
The heatwave intensity is going up or down with the chosen time slice.
Pick your cherry, but admit to it in big upper case.
Geoff S
Hi Geoff, what are your thoughts on choosing the correct inflection points for climate data? The techniques I’ve researched seem wildly interpretative, it would be great if there was a more rigorous methodology which could be applied.
Eric,
There is no point to inflection analysis and adjustment because the original data are too poor for this purpose.
There are plausible examples of inflexions caused by site shifts and there are plausible examples caused by natural variation where no metadata exist to show cause. So guesswork is need from the start..
Even if you end up confident that you have a valid inflection point and a reason for it, you then face the question of how to determine how much adjustment to make. Will it take a large correction or a small one? How much correction should be allowed for natural variation?
Adjustment as practiced for example in ACORN0SAT is guesswork. There is no mention in GUM about how to calculate measurement uncertainty for guesses, nor should there be.
Measurement uncertainty estimates on existing Australian historical data are likely to be more than +/- 0.5 deg C for 1 sigma. The BOM know this and sometimes give an oblique confirmation, but when pressed they quote individual station estimates of performance using the divide by sqrt N method, which does not apply, as a cover-up.
They use +/- 0.5 deg C limits for working out when to replace thermometers in the field.
There is no valid scientific way to calculate how much a thermometer/screen error should be adjusted. The methods should not be used. ACORN-SAT is invalid top to bottom. It is not an excuse to say “The historic record has to be kept because it is all that we have to support our global warming claims”.
Geoff S
I thought the old definition for a “heat wave” used to be 7 days duration (Australian BoM) and the BoM has now reduced it to 3
(heard above discussed about 2 yrs+ ago on a weather channel? – damned if I can remember which – it wasn’t ‘their ABC’, I try to avoid it).
I cannot find any reference to this old definition now …
Can you/someone advise please (with a reference) – I’m sure I wasn’t dreaming at the time (or affected by a slower duration heat wave event)?
That’s their go-to line. But somehow, the data never backs it up.
“Abnormally normal weather?”
Good one!
Yes, climate change is real – always has been, always will be and we all know that if we can just control co2, we can control the climate. It’s as simple as that. /sarc in case anyone takes this comment seriously other than the part that the climate is always changing.