No, not the entire winter. What seems to be happening is that the normally very reliable wind patterns around the poles are breaking down as the poles heat up, and that's creating temporary warm patterns. As one of the articles notes, you might be 60 degrees F above normal for a while, then go back to "normal" winter temperatures.
> "Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of Russia's lower house of parliament, blamed a secret U.S. "climate weapon" for the temperature anomaly that has resulted in unusually warm temperatures this season.
> The Moscow Times reported that Zhuravlyov appeared on the Govorit Moskva radio station on Tuesday, where he said that the United States was purposefully using technology to warm Russia in order to create a climate catastrophe to destabilize the country. "If [Russia's permafrost] melts now, it will be a disaster.... The Americans know this, and they're testing this weapon," he said."
It's worth thinking about political instability as an inevitable follow-on to climate instability.
FFS, the fact that a significant number of people are probably ignorant enough to fall for such propaganda during an age in which Wikipedia and SciHub exist is a travesty.
Zhuravlyov's particular beliefs may be bullshit, but the geopolitical consequences of climate change are real.
For all history, we've been used to treating the land as fixed, and borders as flexible. But the changing climate is about to make a lot of previously habitable land unlivable, and open up some previously uninhabitable areas. The countries of the world have drawn their borders on a map, but now it's the map itself that's about to change under them. Don't you think there will be pressure to readjust those borders?
There are places that usually have quite obvious "winter" such as places in southern Sweden that this year went without any winter at all in the meteorological sense. Even being able to say that with certainty while its still Februrary is quite unusual, normally some of the coldest days are in februrary. I often skate on the lakes in Stockholm well into march.
We've had increasingly mild winters on SW Ontario, Canada as well.
Some people celebrate it. I personally hate it. It still gets cold occasionally, but jumps back up suddenly. It's February and for the past three days it's been almost 10°C. (makes for bad outdoor ice skating :P)
When I was a kid it was normal to have snow up to an adult male's knees. My grandfather has stories of snow drifts covering streetlamps.
In Latvia, usually we had snow in December. Some last years usually after christmas/new year. It is unusual here to be without snow on Christmas - people usually expect it. February 24th, we still don't have snow (we had some days when it was snowing and the snow remained for some days - but nothing you would call a real winter). Temperatures are >0 celsium. Rarely <0 in daylight.
Talked to a 91 yr old and 79 yr old ladies - they say first time we have such a "winter".
So we'll still have to see if we manage to escape winter this year.
I would take it to be a transition from conditions-of-traditional-autumn directly to conditions-of-traditional-spring, skipping the winter that's usually very distinct.
Which has happened in large parts of Europe this year, as the traditional conditions for announcing the start of "meteorogical winter" (which, for my area, is the daily mean temperatures being below 0 °C (32 °F) for five consecutive days) have not happened at all; we've had weather that matches "late autumn" all through from October till now.
We had snow here in the UK for the first time this winter today. It's all gone now, and unless we have more in the next week or two we'll likely not see anymore this year.
Contrast a 1-day of snow winter with those of past harsh winters and you can easily deduce that 'wind and rain' isn't really a winter anymore.
I live in Lithuania and this season winter here has not yet come (and probably won't now).
Typically winters here have a week or two of temperatures reaching -25c in January, with it averaging around -10c the rest of the season. This winter the coldest it reached was -10c, most of the time it has been around 0c. We haven't even had proper snow that has settled.
Nobody I've spoken to (i.e. grandparents) remembers a winter like this before.
I'm in north western Montana. Barely any snow. The inversion layer that covers us most of winter is mostly not here (which is nice). Last February was particularly cold, never going above 16°f and 3ft of snow. Loved it. This February, yesterday was nearly 50°f and we've had a total of maybe 6 to 8 inches all winter. It feels like autumn is going right into spring.
