No sane climate scientist would say that global warming means never having another severe cold snap. What it does mean is a gradual shifting of the odds away from record-breaking cold days and toward record-breaking hot ones.
And that's exactly what we're seeing, even though we still get the occasional Arctic blast. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a nongovernmental research group based in Boulder, Colo., released a report in November showing that, in the continental United States, the ratio of record high temperatures to low temperatures has
increased dramatically in recent decades. In the 1950s, the center reports that ratio slightly exceeded 1 to 1, meaning that there were about as many record-breaking cold days as there were hot ones. By the 2000s, there were twice as many record highs as lows. On a warming planet, we'll still get the lows, just not as often.
But what's particularly troubling is that, even though temperatures have been high, the sun has been throwing a little less heat our way lately. According to NASA, we are currently experiencing the
lowest solar minimum in nearly a century. Nobody knows when the sun will resume its previous output – in the 17th century, the sun went into a 70-year lull that correlated with cooler temperatures on Earth – and there's a chance that it may never come back.