It is extremely cold in large parts of Canada and the US with temperatures far below zero. Large amounts of snow are falling and millions of people are without power. How can this cold be reconciled with the fact that the Earth is warming?
Cold at the North Pole
Every winter the North Pole cools down sharply. The sun no longer shines there and the heat is radiated into space. While in summer it is on average just above freezing, in winter the temperature drops to an average of 22 degrees below zero. From time to time, winds carry this cold air southwards, as now over Canada and the US, where it then becomes extremely cold.
The cold air at the North Pole is simultaneously replaced by warmer air from the south, making it abnormally warm at the North Pole. This is clearly visible in the animation below of the daily temperature in the first 25 days of January 2026. Areas turn blue if it is colder than average there, red if it is warmer than average. In each area, red and blue colors alternate because the wind varies from day to day. You can see that the warm and cold air masses mainly move from west to east. This is because the wind blows mainly from west to east in these areas due to the Earths rotation.
On average it is getting warmer
The North Pole is warming three to four times faster than the Earth as a whole. Since 1950, the North Pole has become more than 4 degrees warmer (figure 1), the world about one degree. In winter it is now on average -22 degrees instead of -26 degrees. That is still extremely cold. And when this cold air flows out over the US, it still becomes extremely cold there, despite the fact that the Earth and also the Arctic region have warmed on average. It would have been a few degrees colder without climate change.
Extremely cold in the US but globally now abnormally warm
In the animation above you can see that on January 25, 2026, it was extremely cold in the US and parts of Russia and Eastern Europe. At the same time, it was abnormally warm in other places, such as Greenland, eastern Russia and Greece, and also globally (figure 2). In only five recent years was the world warmer on January 25; in all other years since 1940 it was colder. Due to redistribution of heat on Earth, it can still be locally abnormally cold, even though the world is getting warmer on average.