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The US capital is covered in snow. Over ten thousand flights have been canceled, CNBC reports. “What happened to global warming?” writes US President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform.
Even in Sweden, right-wing populists have pointed out that snow-covered Sweden is a supposed refutation of global warming.
At the same time, it reports on how the world is going through a historically hot time. 2025 was the third warmest year on record. The last eleven years have been the eleven warmest on record.
How does it actually work?
Paradoxically, the cold we’re experiencing now could be caused by global warming – and an alarming phenomenon over the North Pole.
The EU climate service Copernicus This is exactly the phenomenon the organization points to when summarizing January weather in 2026. A “winding polar jet stream spread freezing air over Europe and North America,” the organization wrote in a press release.
The jet stream is a band of wind high above the Arctic that usually moves in a fairly circular manner around the North Pole, acting as a barrier that traps the cold Arctic air to the north.
The engine that drives the winds is the large temperature difference between the Arctic and the tropics. But the Arctic is currently warming incredibly quickly. The ice that previously reflected the sun’s rays is melting at breakneck speed. The temperature difference decreases.
It appears that the jet stream is slowing down, dissipating and moving far south in large so-called Rossby waves (named after the Swedish-American meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby).
Suddenly it can be freezing cold Arctic air flows down over the continents. Rossby waves can also cause weather systems to remain stuck in the same location for extended periods of time. That seems to have happened now. The result: According to Copernicus, Europe experienced its coldest January since 2010.
This alarming behavior of the jet stream has been linked to a number of severe weather events in recent years, such as the extreme heat in Northern Europe in the summer of 2018, the catastrophic floods in Germany in the summer of 2021, and the extreme cold in Texas that crippled the state’s power grid. When climate scientist Shuang-ye Wu recently summarized the extreme weather events of 2025 for Space magazine, she noted that they had “the fingerprints of the jet stream everywhere.”
It should be noted that the impact of global warming on the jet stream is hotly debated – exactly how the jet stream will change is unclear. However, there is general agreement that it will have an impact.
But it’s not the jet stream the whole explanation for why January feels so cold this year. Another important factor is our short memory.
January this year was undoubtedly cold compared to previous years. However, if you look further back, a completely different picture emerges. In SMHI’s data, it turns out that this year’s cold is worth nothing compared to many of the January months that preceded global warming.
In climate research we talk about “shifting baselines,” which means that we have become accustomed to extremes. We’re simply deceiving ourselves when we call this year’s January cold – and the news media’s distorted picture of reality is helping us along the way. We see the cold in Europe and are bombarded with reports of how cold it is in the US.
But as Copernicus points out, other parts of the Earth were also extremely hot. In January, devastating fires raged in Australia, Argentina and Chile and were hardly seen in the news. Globally, January this year was 1.47 degrees warmer than before industrialization.
It could freeze here in Sweden. But the earth sweats.
Read more: In some places, January was one of the coldest months in decades
