Weather is a subject that can finagle its way into politics in all kinds of interesting and surprising ways.
Hurricane Katrina likely was the beginning of the end for the GOP’s chances to hold onto the White House thanks to President George Dubya Bush’s absolute failure in handling its aftermath. The February 1969 East Coast snowstorm nearly derailed New York City Mayor John Lindsay’s political career due to streets not being plowed for a week. An early-season snowstorm or a cold rainstorm on election day can swing key races.
But while this week’s news was mostly about The Worst First Week of Any Presidential Term in American History(tm) the weather stuck its nose into the news due to two notable events, one directly about weather and one mostly about free speech but weather adjacent.
The first one is the arctic outbreak that plagued much of the US east of the Rockies this week. Trust me, it was quite cold, as my backyard in central Pennsylvania saw three consecutive mornings with lows below zero. There was also an insane winter storm that brought up to 13 inches of snow to New Orleans and up to 10 inches to parts of northern Florida, both records. This was not gloppy wet southern snow, but dry powdery wind-driven northern-style snow, falling with temperatures in the mid-20s. Some people enjoyed the novelty, others hated it. Hang in there, Adrastos, normal highs in the 60s return for you by the second half of the weekend.
Of course, any major weather event is now political, because one party sees all the evidence of climate change that science provides, and the other is delusional and believes it’s a Chinese hoax. As you can imagine, the climate change denial crowd points at a record southern snowstorm and grunts “lol climate change yeah right.”
However, while more research is needed to confirm because that’s what science is all about, the Great Blizzard of 2025 for New Orleans and Florida likely was fueled by climate change. This is because warmer Gulf of MEXICO waters add more water vapor to the air and therefore storms are more likely to produce more precipitation. But what about those cold temperatures? No one with much credit behind it said that climate change would end cold temperature extremes. Another example is the Texas cold outbreak. In fact, climate change may have screwed the atmosphere up enough to allow cold arctic air to spill south at times. “At times” is the key here; while snow and cold won’t end, the frequency is falling even as extremes increase.
Another example of this is increased amounts of blockbuster East Coast snowstorms. This leads me to a quick aside, a challenge for any science communicator like myself, via a Tweet from Dr. Marshall Shepherd, who you can now find at Bluesky with the rest of us normal-ish people.
While I think number 1 continues to be a huge issue communicating weather to the public, number 4 is quite relevant to the current moment.
In any event, the cold weather forced Toughest Toughie Ever Donald Trump to move his inauguration indoors, which saved us endless debates about crowd size.
The other thing, the more weather-adjacent thing, is a Milwaukee television weather forecaster got canned, not for a bad forecast or anything like what Groping Drunk Pete Hegseth did, but instead committing the sin of being anti-fascist.
Sam Kuffel, a young on-air meteorologist, put her career in jeopardy for doing the unforgivable thing of posting something political on her personal social media, and by political I mean stating that obvious that Elon Musk is a Nazi. Despite claims that he was doing the “Roman salute” (ALSO NOT GREAT) or waving at a fly or whatever the give-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-only-to-GOPers mainstream media types came up with to wave it off, Adrastos is correct.
I miss the lovely good old days when saying that Nazism is bad wasn’t a political thing. AOC is also correct:
AOC: I don’t care what Elon Musk is doing behind the presidential seal, but in this country we hate Nazis. Kind of like a foundational defining thing. Two of the foundational things about American history is that we beat the confederates and we beat the Nazis.
So, the Free Speech Warriors, who had a fit about saying that the British young adult author who is worth billions attacking trans people is bad, came to her defense, right? Surely, the Queen of Free Speech Bari Weiss had lots of stuff about it on her publication that she started after she was canceled, um, I mean, quit her job, right?
You try to find it. I couldn’t.
In any event, those of us who were freezing and looking in dismay at snow-covered backyard palm trees will get a nice break in the cold, and even looks warmer than average in the long term. At least you have that. In the meantime, I hope Sam finds a new job. I watched a clip of her and she’s an excellent TV meteorologist.
The last word goes to Led Zeppelin and the deceptively named tune Immigrant Song, which is about Norsemen riding the cold winds of their northern homelands to wreak havoc, which is sort of what happened to Astrastos’ abode.