You should familiarize yourself with the polar vortex, the impact that ongoing climate change has on its now semi-regular collapse, and how this leads to massive cold fronts pushing south in the central region of the US. What is changing due to atmospheric warming is the frequency and magnitude of these events. Maybe do a bit of basic research next time before revealing your ignorance.

In the Midwest we call it a “cold winter”, they’ve been happening with regularity for a few hundred years. On the upside, the coyote hunting gets great once the temps get around -15 or so, just don’t forget your pack boots and down long johns.

Sorry, I meant a few million years, not a few hundred.

Who makes long johns of down?

> but it's still difficult for me to imagine that a giant continent-wide blizzard is a sign of global warming.

Of course no individual event is "proof of global warming", but this is entirely consistent with it.

This points out the huge failure in communication about climate change, but this is in fact exactly the sort of thing you would expect (and why "global warming" is such an easy term to misunderstand).

Short story is there is more energy in the atmosphere (i.e. heat) and it has to go somewhere. One of the places it goes is into higher variability in weather patterns, more energetic storms, changes is stable weather patterns. So that absolutely includes lower winter lows, as well as higher summer highs. Most of the modelling shows events like this winter storm growing in both intensity and frequency.

So far from the contradiction you (seem to?) see, it's pretty much what is expected.

ska says >"Of course no individual event is "proof of global warming", but this is entirely consistent with it."<

But one might just as easily say that this event is entirely consistent with "proof of no global warming" also.

possible vs. probably is a factor here. It doesn't help a "no warming" scenario, but it's also not a silver bullet.

The isn't the first time it has snowed in Texas. When it happened 150 years ago it wasn't "due to climate change" (literal quote from parent). This time it is. Warming enthusiasts undermine their argument by trying to have it both ways. They should ignore weather, and emphasize average temperatures.

Nobody is trying to have it both ways (what is a "warming enthusiast, anyway?) People someone articulate it poorly, but unless they are really confused they aren't saying that literally this data point is "due to climate change", but that seeing more unusual weather patterns is likely due to climate change. The first is a category error, the second is a decent interpretation of available data.

I woke up to a snow on Feb 15 is "just" weather. If I live in Austin, it was pretty weird. If I live in Anchorage, pretty normal. The difference between those two statements is not about weather, but about climate.

One lesson of climate change is that our past experiences of weather in a place are often going to become poorer and poorer predictors of next months weather. The fact that change involves a global warming phenomena tells us that both the weather and the changes in it are likely to get more intense.