The warming of Earth’s climate doesn’t mean that the whole planet is warm all year round. Much of the world continues to experience cold, snowy winters. And there’s even some reason to think that climate change will lead to an overall increase, not decrease, in severe winter weather across the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate latitudes.
The extent of that effect, however, is somewhat controversial. Weather varies from year to year, cold snaps and blizzards are nothing new, and the decades-long trends in their frequency are noisy. It’s challenging to establish a correlation between severe winter weather and climate change, let alone a causal relationship.
A new study by Hannah Bailey of the University of Oulu in Finland and her colleagues takes a different tack.1 In addition to examining trends and correlations, the researchers focused on a specific snowfall event that hit Europe in February and March of 2018. The snow...
