The recent New York Times (NYT) article “Climate Change Is Fueling Extremes, Both Hot and Cold” by David Gelles claims that global warming is simultaneously driving “colder colds” and “hotter hots,” presenting recent U.S. weather as confirmation of a long-warned scientific expectation. That claim is patently false, built on a rewrite of both history and evidence. Actual data debunks the claims.
“Colder colds. Hotter hots. These are the intense bouts of unusual weather that scientists for decades warned would become more common with global warming,” asserts the author, repeatedly pointing to supposed polar-vortex disruptions as proof that warming can intensify cold extremes even as it raises average temperatures. This framing suggests a settled scientific consensus that never existed.
Let’s start with what scientists have actually said about temperature extremes.
Observed data align with those original expectations that human CO2 emissions should cause a decline in cold days, not increasing cold extremes. Even climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, hardly a climate skeptic, makes this point in his analysis “Fact check: Climate change is not making extreme cold more common.” Reviewing attribution studies and observations, Hausfather shows that the overwhelming majority of extreme-cold analyses find cold events less likely in a warming world, with only one out of dozens of studies suggesting an increase in cold in a specific case. The long-term warming signal dominates, making cold extremes rarer overall.
In the United States, which is the focus of the article, the picture is even less supportive of the “both hot and cold” claim. As meteorologist Chris Martz notes in his X thread posted here, extreme heat and extreme cold have both declined since the early twentieth century. As shown in the graphs he created (seen below) the blistering heat of the 1930s and 1950s still stands out as the hottest peak periods on record, while cold waves dropped sharply after the late 1980s. Comparing the 30-year periods 1901–1930 and 1996–2025 using GHCN-Daily station data, Martz finds cold waves decreased by about 31 percent and heat waves by about 20 percent.
Those graphs are not cherry-picked anecdotes; they are station-based observations over proper climatological periods.
As Martz documents in his X rebuttal, scientists did not predict that warming would produce more frequent or more intense cold extremes. Only heat extremes were expected to increase. Martz cites the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2001 Third Assessment Report, which explicitly stated that an increase in mean temperatures would lead to “more frequent extreme high temperatures and less frequent extreme low temperatures,” a finding summarized directly from the IPCC TAR chapter available in the report PDF. The same report projected “fewer cold days” and “fewer frost days” across nearly all land areas during the twenty-first century.
That is the opposite of what Gelles claims scientists have “warned for decades.”
In a vain effort to support its untenable claims for warming causing extreme cold, Gelles suggests that climate change is altering the polar-vortex, implying that Arctic warming weakens the jet stream, allowing frigid Arctic air to spill south more often. But this idea is unsupported by observations. Climate at a Glance summarizes the evidence on temperature extremes in “The Polar Vortex” and “U.S. Heat Waves,” showing that while hot extremes have increased in some regions since 1950, cold extremes have generally declined. Climate Realism has repeatedly called out media overreach on these topics, with numerous critiques on “extreme cold” and the “polar vortex,” where the supposed link between warming and worsening cold is shown to be speculative and inconsistent with measured trends.
This article is not reporting science as it was understood or as it is observed, but retrofitting today’s headlines to yesterday’s weather. When summer warming is said to produce higher temperatures, Gelles is ready to blame it on climate change. When winter produces colder temperatures, he blames that too on climate change, in both cases based on the flimsiest of evidence, which is contradicted by the IPCC’s assessments and the bulk of observational data.
Gelles should acknowledge that the scientific expectation in a warming world has long been for fewer cold extremes. Observations largely confirm that expectation. The idea of warming “fueling” cold extremes may play better into the narrative that humans are causing dangerous climate extremes and wild weather swings, but it is factually wrong.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
