If you’re reading this in the Southern Hemisphere, you will probably already know that the temperatures have been somewhat heated since the beginning of this year.
If you’re reading this in the Northern Hemisphere, and I know most of you are, because I’ve checked, you will probably not have the faintest idea that local cold does not mean global cold.
What’s been happening, to use colloquial, ordinary, everyday language, is that the Climate has been changing at the top of the world, the region near the North Pole. Winds have changed, patterns of heating and freezing have changed, rain and snowfall have changed.
This has had a knock-on effect – some of the areas further South have had a great deal of cooling over Winter. The Arctic has been acting like a giant air conditioner for parts of Northern Europe and Northern America.
You shiver in Paris (or London, or New York), but the Siberian and Canadian permafrost is melting.
Proper Winter has made its return. We’ve had lots of snow, enough to build miniature igloos. But will Winter always be this hard in the inhabited Northern Hemisphere in future ? Will this air con last ? Very probably not, as the amount of permanent ice and frozen ground in the far North is reducing :-
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Arctic-Sea-Ice-Part-1-Is-Arctic-Sea-Ice-recovering.html
https://climateprogress.org/2010/03/22/thin-ice-arctic-winds-sea-ice-extent-global-warming/
The daffodils and primulas know best. As the study of their blooming shows, the early bud catches the warm :-
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Flowers-blooming-earlier-now-than-any-time-in-last-250-years.html