If you are a climate-change denier in the eastern US, including the president, then the past few weeks have been a dream. It is cold and snowy — you might say, colder and snowier than in years. Therefore, climate change is a hoax, just as I am always saying. Would I be able to hold this snowball otherwise? Check and mate.
Unfortunately, extreme spells of winter weather can still happen in an atmosphere made more chaotic by rising heat. That a record-smashing summer heat wave is happening in Australia at the same time that a brutal winter cold is punishing the eastern US illustrates the point. All these weather extremes endanger people and make them poorer, costs that would keep mounting the more we waste time pretending the problem does not exist or hoping half-measures will suffice.
It is no coincidence that, as temperatures have risen this century, so has the damage from climate-fueled weather. The world has spent US$20 trillion in the past 25 years cleaning up and insuring property after disasters, Bloomberg Intelligence estimates. That includes US$1.4 trillion last year, a rare and merciful dip from 2024’s record US$1.6 trillion, thanks in part to the US avoiding landfall from a hurricane for the first time in a decade.
The costs include not only hurricanes, floods and wildfires, but also deep freezes and winter storms. As you might expect, the latter two events do not seem to have increased in frequency as the planet has become hotter — but they have not gone away.
For the past 40 years in the US, there have more or less consistently been one or two winter storms or freezes or both each year that are strong enough to inflict at least US$1 billion in damage, according to the nonprofit group Climate Central.
Sometimes the events inflict terrible death tolls and financial costs, as did 1993’s Storm of the Century and 2021’s winter storm Uri. So far there has been no consistent trend for either better or worse.
It is true this winter’s assault on the US has been unusually damaging, not long after Uri’s record-breaking US$28 billion hit. Winter storm Fern, which affected more than half the people in the US, and at one point resulted in about 1 million power failures, inflicted between US$105 billion and US$115 billion in total economic losses, private weather forecasting firm AccuWeather has estimated.
That would make it the country’s costliest natural disaster since the California wildfires a year ago. A follow-up storm and deep freeze that dumped snow across the southeast US and froze citrus trees in Florida cost an additional US$13 billion to US$15 billion, AccuWeather said.
All of this has been another boon to the companies in Bloomberg Intelligence’s Prepare and Repair index, which has beaten the S&P 500 this year and every year for the past five. Foot traffic to home-improvement stores on Jan. 23, just ahead of Fern, was up 41 percent from a year earlier, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew John Stevenson said. That helped Prepare and Repair stalwarts such as Home Depot Inc make up for a slow hurricane season.
Of course, repeatedly buying plywood, sandbags and snowblowers and frantically hoarding French toast ingredients, as one does ahead of every storm, is no way to run a productive economy. Unless the business is disaster, disasters are generally bad for business.
One possible silver lining is that, contrary to whatever US President Donald Trump might post on social media, cold weather truly has become less frequent in the past few decades, particularly in the US and other relatively northern places.
For most of the world, the coldest days of the year are noticeably warmer than they were 50 years ago, Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the nonprofit research group Berkeley Earth, wrote in the Climate Brink newsletter. Across the US, on average, there are 13 fewer below-freezing days each year than there were in 1970.
There is a theory that a hotter planet could make occasional wintry blasts more likely. For one thing, because the arctic is heating more quickly than the middle of the planet, the temperature differential between the two, which helps keep the polar jet stream under control, is weakening. When the jet stream wobbles, it lets polar air invade lower latitudes. The jet stream also slows down under such conditions, meaning it does not snap back quickly.
However, climate scientists have not yet been able to demonstrate this convincingly. What the data do show is that US cities have set four times as many record high daily temperatures this winter than lows, according to Climate Central. Snowpack in the western US is at a record ebb, even after last month’s snowstorm. That means bare ski slopes and less water for the already strained Colorado River later this year.
Suffice it to say that, for now, a hotter planet has not yet made winter storms obsolete, even as it has made other natural disasters more frequent, or at least more dangerous. Deaths from cold weather might decrease as the planet warms, but not disappear, while deaths from hot weather increase.
No matter the weather, then, we should be trying to keep the climate from becoming more chaotic while better preparing communities to handle the chaos already in store. The climate-change deniers setting policy in the US are doing neither. Snowballs melt. The harm that will result from such malpractice will linger.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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