It’s become a familiar pattern by now. Every cold snap that grips the nation brings with it a bunch of hot air from conservative politicians who seize on subzero temperatures and declare global warming a hoax.
Mocking climate protesters who interrupted Republican campaign events in Iowa, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., posted on social media: “You’ve got to appreciate the irony of climate protestors trudging through a foot of snow and -30 degree wind chills to yell about how the planet is warming. They just don’t see it, do they?”
Every cold snap brings with it a bunch of hot air from conservative politicians who declare global warming a hoax.
When a climate protester in that same state was tackled by security guards at a campaign event for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., gleefully posted a video of the protester being body-slammed. He wrote, “The irony of protesting global warming during a once in a lifetime cold snap/blizzard. dude found out!” And after a climate protester held up a sign calling former President Donald Trump a “climate criminal,” Politico quoted Trump adviser Chris LaCivita as saying: “Climate change? It’s minus 15 degrees. Read the room, man.”
That echoed what the nation heard for four years from the White House under Trump. In January 2019, when there were minus 60-degree wind chills in the Midwest, he tweeted, misspelling and all, “People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!”
According to NBC News, as of Wednesday afternoon, more than 100 million people were under wind chill advisories and at least 12 had died, including at least three in Southern states. And another blast of cold air is still expected to hit this week.
Despite the skepticism from those Republicans that cold weather and climate change can co-exist, it’s important to remember that, for many of us, the cold snap is just a moment of discomfort, while climate change is a long-term disaster. Scientists are mixed as to how connected modern cold snaps are to the warming of the Arctic and how much they’re the result of natural variability despite the warming. Some models, according to a 2021 explainer by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, point to stronger polar vortexes. Others point to weaker polar vortexes.
However, all signs point to an overall trend of warmer winters. Tuesday, for example, was the first time New York City had gotten at least an inch of snow in almost two years. Just before Christmas, snow cover in the U.S. was the least that had ever been recorded for that time of year. Maine, hardly known for tropical downpours in January, last week saw record water levels in Portland and flooding all along the coast.
Tuesday was the first time New York City had gotten at least an inch of snow in almost two years. Just before Christmas, snow cover in the U.S. was the least that had ever been recorded for that time of year.
Some media outlets anticipated the cynical conservative reactions and published pieces explaining why today’s frigid weather isn’t inconsistent with the heating of the planet and warming of the climate. There’s the National Geographic headline: “Why cold weather doesn’t mean climate change is fake.” And one from CNN: “As unprecedented heat makes way for cold, it can provide fuel for climate-change deniers who point to freezing temperatures as evidence that global warming is overstated.”
Comments from Boebert, Massie and LaCivita certainly justify those explainers. As for the Trump adviser’s argument that climate protesters need to “read the room,” the fact is that it’s the people in the deniers’ camp who have become more sophisticated in reading the room and taking the temperature of climate politics.
There is new evidence that conservatives and fossil fuel interests, confronted with the fact that 99.9% of studies agree that humans cause climate change and the recent confirmation that 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, are changing their message. A study published this week by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that deniers are dramatically shifting on social media from outright claims that climate change isn’t real to spreading disinformation about solutions.
Based on its analysis of 4,458 hours of climate-denial content on YouTube, the study found that the percentage of posts completely denying climate change have dropped from 65% of posts in 2018 to 30% today. Conversely, posts criticizing proposed solutions to climate change have soared to 70% of content. The prime target of what the report calls the “New Denial” is renewable energy. Deniers are going to new lengths to say that renewable energy eats up land and destroys the environment and local economies, that getting rid of fossil fuels means lowering the standard of living, that solar and wind energy are too undependable and that there are actual benefits to plants on land with warming and to coral reefs with seawater rise. None of that is true. There is new evidence that conservatives and fossil fuel interests, confronted with the recent confirmation that 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, are changing their message. In the introduction to the CCDH report, CEO Imran Ahmed said this new campaign of disinformation, often funded by the oil and gas industry, is “cynically used by political leaders to explain why they remain stubbornly incapable of taking urgent corrective action.” Despite the shift, the old cynicism is also still alive, requiring a rebuttal of both old denialism and new. The CCDH report said one of the original mantras of climate change denialism is that winter weather “is too cold for global warming to be true.” Fox Business host Larry Kudlow parroted that line Sunday when he said our current weather, which he called “global freezing,” reaffirms that climate change is a “complete and utter hoax.” Straddling both generations of denialism, Kudlow said, “The socialist Green New Deal is a hoax, also.” On cold snaps themselves, there’s some disagreement in the climate models as to whether or how the warming of the Arctic relates to colder weather in the U.S. In a 2021 explainer about the polar vortex, NOAA climate expert Amy Butler said, “I think that the effect of global warming [on the polar vortex] is currently small compared to the noise of natural variability, and in the future, any influence on winter weather would be small compared to the overall warming influence of greenhouse gases.” There is disagreement over the influence of greenhouse gases. That’s why many climate deniers are shifting from hoax to disinformation and fighting to delay anything that might mitigate what’s happening. The shrill cry of “hoax” hasn’t been completely buried. There remains plenty of hot air from deniers, for sure. It’s too bad that in these current conditions, it can’t be used to keep anybody warm.
Derrick Z. Jackson
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow in climate and energy at the Center for Science and Democracy. A former columnist for The Boston Globe, he’s the co-author of “Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock.” 
